Summer came to an end and we had to face the reality of going back to school. Hayden is in seventh grade and gets up too early for me to follow him out to the bus to snap a picture, but the girls don't leave until much later, so I got pictures of them. Actually, Sydney and Hayden started a day before Maura, because only half of her kindergarten class went the first day, half the second and then the whole class went on the third day that week. So Maura and I sent the older two to school and she and I had one last day together.
She planned the whole thing. First we went to the park and then we ate at, you guessed it, McDonald's. It was wonderful, but heartbreaking too. Maura has been my lunch buddy for so long, and now it is over, five years have passed and she is off to all day kindergarten. I am happy for her, but sad for me.
Sydney is in the fourth grade this year. Her teacher was a fifth grade teacher last year and he did not want to have to move classrooms, so even though he is teaching fourth grade, they are in the fifth grade wing of the school and have their own, individual lockers. It seems that my children are growing up faster here than they would have in Utah!
Here are my two girls, ready for school and watching for the bus. Maura had to wear her bus pass around her neck for the first few weeks of school until the kindergarteners learned the routine.
While waiting for their bus, they like to get out their scooters and go over the "bumps" that have been made by tree roots underneath our driveway. They have serious skills.
This is the moment. The one that every mother dreams of and secretly dreads, the day that their youngest child leaves for school. It is humbling to realize that they suddenly spend more waking hours with another adult, a teacher that you have never met before. Part of me was relieved, part of me was scared and another part of me was absolutely heart broken. How had we got to this point in time so quickly? Going back into the empty house was lonely.
