A Whole New Level

This is the girl that started middle school (sixth) yesterday. She just started kindergarten with her pink back pack and yellow shirt and khaki skirt just a day before that, I am sure. Time does a number on moms. It expands and contracts like the worst of funhouse mirrors, making days seem to stretch out forever--far beyond the exhaustion of our last bit of energy--and then the years seem to fly by while we catch a few winks before the swift return of morning. Crazy.


These are the boys that can now walk to their brand new elementary school just around the corner. The school is shiny new, smelling of new books and fresh paint. Z is now in the fourth grade and is quickly entering the phase where the only acceptable public parental interaction involves begrudging scowls. CW is in second grade and will, for the time being, still smile for pictures. Summer has flown by and it is all of a sudden crazy quiet at my house for several hours a day, punctuated only by the occasional bickering of M and Bam--which will be further diminished once Bam begins preschool next week.

Yesterday I also helped out with my first official PTA function. It was a "BooHoo Breakfast" for the kindergarten parents, many of whom just sent their first born to school for the first time. We have a very young neighborhood and kindergarten is by far the largest grade at our school. It was so fun to see classes walking through the halls of the school, learning where everything is. The fun was heightened by recognizing so many kids in so many different classes. The elementary school boundaries mirror exactly the ward boundaries--what outliers there may be are zone variances, many of whom I know from former wards or time at former elementary schools. This school really feels like it is ours. We have waited and wished and wanted so very much for it and now it is here; it is close and it promises to be wonderful, with its shiny newness, its stellar teachers and its promises of close knit student body.

CE's school is large; it is largely unknown, but it is an adventure, the next frontier, the future world for our family. Just moments ago, I was the one in school, with notebooks and blue books and assignments to juggle. The juggling remains; there are always assignments, but thankfully no blue books (and by the time my quickly growing little ones make it to college, knowledge of blue books may be proof their mother truly educated herself in the dark ages). I have friends who mourn the return of school each year. Now, I don't like the passage of time, the advancing ages of my children or the spiraling complications of the world with more than one school, more than one activity, assignment, and deadline. But, I love fall. I love learning. I love that my kids are just as geeky as I am and were over the moon excited to be returning to those school books and pencils of school and I want them to forever believe that school, that learning is something about which to always be excited.