Back to School

I'm going to have to take a break from vacation blogging....

This morning I woke up needing some of these:

Why you ask? Well, yesterday I sent this baby:


Followed by this baby:

To school. I did pretty good all day. We had homemade cinnamon rolls for breakfast, I packed their lunches and snacks the night before complete with little napkin notes, their backpacks were packed and ready to go, I made cookies for when they came home and Gabe and I enjoyed some Mommy and me time. Everything was going pretty well, until...the bus was 30 minutes late getting home. My babies got off the bus exhausted and hot and the first words out of Ethan's mouth were "I had a bad day". Now, you have to know Ethan. Ethan mutters these words a lot, in fact his catch phrase, the thing he's known for is having the best day of his life and then emotionally crashing followed up with "This is the worst day ever". It's not that he's an ungrateful child or doesn't enjoy life, Ethan just has really high highs and really low lows.

From what I could gather from our conversation the worst part of the day was all the sitting, followed by the fact that a little girl pinched him three times (love taps?) and he didn't have enough time to eat his fruit roll-up at lunch (this is a huge deal in our house, because I only buy fruit roll-ups about once a year). The best part of the day was riding the bus...that was all he could think of...poor guy.

None of these conversations reduced me to a crying mess at the end of the day, the ultimate clincher was when I went to tuck him in last night. He'd been asleep for hours and was curled into a little ball under the quilt I made him. My entering the room disturbed him enough to make him roll over and in his sleep, very quietly I heard him whisper..."I wanna go home"...even typing this just breaks my heart....I tucked him nice and tightly and whispered in his ear, "Don't worry baby, you are home..." right before I started to sob. Thankfully I have a pretty great husband who just let me cry and for once didn't try to fix anything, he just let me cry....which is why I need those ponds cucumber eye pads. You should have seen the shiners I had this morning, between my ragweed allergy and the crying I looked like I should have been answering people's stares with "If you think I look bad, you should see the other guy!", okay it wasn't that bad.....close....

Here are some pics from yesterday:

How did we go from this:

To this:


In what felt like a blink...how is it possible that I have a second grader and a kindergartner. I am blown away....

Oh, and on an equally important side not...Sam had a wonderful day. He's such an easygoing mellow kid and everything about learning excites him. I'm hoping Ethan will learn to enjoy school as much as Sam does, I'm pretty confident he will!