What to do the week fall arrives

Labor Day weekend is when the house changes over: the fall bin comes down, something goes in the oven, the light quits earlier. That's this week, one activity per age band. (Grandparents Day is next.) The cinnamon shapes need three days on a rack, so plan those for the first visit.

Pull five or six things out of the fall bin the week it comes down and put them in a low laundry basket on the floor instead of straight into a drawer: a wool scarf, a corduroy jacket, one rubber boot, a knit hat. Set the basket out before he arrives and let him empty it one item at a time, naming the texture as he gets to each one: scratchy, slippery, fuzzy. From about ten months up he'll work through the whole basket, and he'll put the hat on you. Fifteen minutes, and everything goes back in the closet.

This one costs nothing you don’t already own. If you want the version that stays at your house after the basket goes back, Fall, from the Bright Baby Touch and Feel series is $5.99, and the fur and corduroy patches are what he goes for long before the pictures. Board pages, and short enough to get read forty times.

Stir a cup of ground cinnamon into three-quarters of a cup of applesauce until it stiffens into dough that smells like a candle shop. Roll it a quarter-inch thick, cut shapes, punch a hole near the top with a straw, and leave them on a rack for three days. Thread ribbon through and hang them on a doorknob. It isn't edible despite the smell, so say so once, and keep the loose cinnamon at the table.

A preschooler who has to come back Thursday to check on something she made Monday has a reason to come back Thursday, and they hold their smell for months.

Two pantry ingredients and a wine glass for a rolling pin cover Monday. If it becomes an October habit, Melissa & Doug’s Modeling Dough and Sculpting Tools set puts real rollers and cutters within reach for around $42. The eight tubs get used up; you’ll still have the tools in five years.

The window that matters is the one she can see out of sitting down, at kitchen-table height rather than the tall one over the sink. Clean the glass properly, press the suction cups on hard, and fill the tray with black-oil sunflower seed. Tape an index card beside the window and write the date at the top.

From then on, whoever spots a bird first writes the date and what it was, even if all it says is sparrow, again. Nothing shows up for the first three to five days. Tell her that before she starts watching, or the whole thing dies on a Tuesday.

Early September is when the tally starts changing. The birds that were around all July begin giving way to birds moving through, and a written list is how a nine-year-old catches that while it’s happening instead of reading about it later. Twenty minutes to install, then five minutes a visit for a couple of weeks.

There’s no version of this without the feeder on the glass, so it’s worth getting the one that keeps getting used. We’d hang the Window Bird Feeder from Nature’s Hangout, around $20, because the tray slides out, and that’s the detail that decides whether a feeder is still being refilled in November or was quietly abandoned in October. Two honest limits: the suction cups need genuinely clean glass, and they lose grip below freezing. That’s a December problem, not a September one.

Nobody announces the end of the summer thing. The walk to the ice cream place after dinner, the last hour in the yard before bed: sometime in the next three weeks it's dark at seven and that one quietly stops happening. It didn't get cancelled. The calendar took it. So ask your grandchild which summer thing she'd want to do one more time, and then say a specific day out loud. Saturday the nineteenth, four o'clock. Write it somewhere the parents can see it, since a date said out loud in a kitchen has evaporated by Tuesday.

A photo of the tree out front travels, and so does your voice, and so does a book read over video; the smell of a house in early September stays where it is. So fill a small screw-top jar with two cinnamon sticks, a spoonful of whole cloves, a bay leaf, and a strip of orange peel dried on a windowsill for two days. Tape an index card to the lid in your own handwriting: put this in a pot, add water, keep it low. Address the package to your grandchild rather than to his parents. Text the parents separately with the delivery window and ask them to run the stove that day, then call twenty minutes after it goes on and ask him one question: what does the house smell like right now.

Know a grandparent who'd mail a jar of cinnamon sticks eight states away just to change the smell of a room? Forward this their way. →