In which I end with another football reference.

Field hockey preseason starts tomorrow, and that means summer is over. I mean, it'll be sweaty and hot and humid tomorrow for double sessions, but at the very start of practice, it'll be a little windy and brisk every now and then, and some of the girls might arrive with a long-sleeve layer over their tank tops. So it's as good as fall in my experience.

We spent the last two weeks squeezing in as much summer as we could before the start of kindergarten and preschool and gymnastics and dance class. This year, Rudy will try out both of the activities she's enviously watched Marley perform for the almost three years of her life. And she'll get all the hand-me-down leotards she wants.

Two weekends ago, I roused the girls early for the balloon lift-off at the Annual Balloon Fest sponsored by our public library. It was too much to ask them to get dressed before 6 a.m., so they were still in their nighties, but there was enough of that preseason chill in the air for Rudy to wear her Hawk hoodie.

And the same day, just a couple of hours later, I left with my college roommate Genevra for a six-hour drive past Syracuse so that we could make the wedding of my college suitemate Casey. The wedding was the kind of relaxed, thoughtful, and idyllic celebration that everyone thinks they'll pull off when few truly do. And then the next morning Genevra and I drove another six hours home and I got pulled over for speeding by a New York statie. I saw the red lights behind me and said in a simultaneously resigned and panicked way, "Oh. I'm getting pulled over. Sorry." And then I made my way to the right, but it took me a few seconds too long to get to the breakdown lane, and Genevra gave me a stern, "What are you doing?" I think maybe I was hoping somewhere deep inside that he really wanted someone in front of me.

Then I had a day to catch up on laundry and to keep working on recent issues with my mother at her assisted living facility before I got back in the car, this time with my family, for a drive to the mountains in Stowe, Vermont.

Our time there with friends was a sort-of reward after finally resolving the problems brought up at a recent meeting the staff at my mom's assisted living called for with my sister and me. The one in which they told us, "You need a team of third-parties in here three times a day to monitor her glucose readings and insulin injections or she can no longer live here. And also, she's getting to be belligerent and disruptive, especially in the evening, and she may need medication to keep her and the other residents and staff safe." In other words, find an at-home care service and make lots of phone calls, daily, with a series of doctors, or start the search for a nursing home earlier than you had planned. And also, in other words, follow through on that appointment with the neurologist to get an anti-psychotic prescription. These chores ate up many, many hours of time for at least three weeks.

But we made it to Vermont and had a couple of relaxed days with friends and their two little boys who usually live all the way in London. The older boy, Rhys, is slightly younger than Marley and was actually singing the Spiderman theme song while his action figure scaled a small plastic wall. The younger boy, Liam, is slightly older than Rudy and has a fantastic blanket that he snuggles with; it's the sort of thing that makes you think of Linus, in a really good, sweet way. And I did ask Rhys to say, "Silly old bear," for Bean and Toot because I thought he might sound like Christopher Robin, and they both loved the new Winnie-the-Pooh movie, but he imitated my speech instead (easy for him because his mother's from Vermont), and then I didn't want to push it.

When we got home, I tried, for one ambitious, and ultimately failed morning, to potty train Rudy. I showed her the Yo Gabba Gabba and Elmo undies that I had hidden and asked her if she wanted to try to use the potty. The undies motivated her like nothing else has. She was so excited to put them on and try to keep them dry, and so proud of the teaspoon of urine that leaked out after I sat her on the potty for over an hour. And then she got up and went into the playroom, and peed herself. In the picture above, she's standing in a puddle. I honestly didn't know it when I took the picture; I thought she was having such a desperate and dramatic little tantrum that it should be recorded for posterity. Instead, I've got yet another primary source for the history of Rudy's tortured relationship with the potty.

She went right through about five or six pairs in the next three hours, and I admitted defeat. She's just not ready; apparently, she still has no idea when the pee is on its way. So we might try again before preschool starts in mid-September, and we might not.

And then there were the doctor's appointments. First, my mother's, in which, much to my despair, she displayed the agitation and belligerence described by the assisted living facility to the neurologist and his staff. She awkwardly threw things in the waiting room. She yelled at the doctor. She stormed out of the examination room and slammed the door. When I went to retrieve her, she was swearing and stilted and then clenched her fists, shook them in my face, and grunted and screamed in frustration. I was weary when I got home, and I am glad that I didn't bring Bean and Toot to that one, and I am glad that I have therapy lined up for tomorrow.

At Rudy's latest appointment with her orthopedist, in which she once again looted some purple latex gloves while waiting in the examination room, everything was swell. Her legs look straighter, the phosphorus and calcitriol seem to be working, and we'll go back in six months for what I hope is more of the same.

So. We've been busy. And tomorrow we get busier, and I start blowing a whistle at a crowd of fourteen- to eighteen-year-olds with ponytails and sticks and wish I could be half the inspiration that Eric Taylor is. Clear eyes, full heart, can't lose. That might really be true, actually.