First Week of School...A New Normal

Well this was a big week in our house. Bryce started first grade and Ella started preschool. It has been such a strange week for me to go from 3 kids at home all of the time down to sometimes only one at home. There are many reasons why it will be great for the two of them to go to school. For instance grocery shopping and cleaning bathrooms and not having to referee every moment of every day. There is also the quietness factor. One kid is so much less noise than three. Have I told you all that I love quiet? I actually crave quiet. I could roll around and eat up quiet. (Okay, so enough about quiet.) I love the new found one on one time also. It feels like with this new schedule I can actually pay individual attention to each of them and not just to the gang of them. Walking to school has been fun and all of the conversations that have evolved from that new time. I also love to be able browse a store and actually see what I am looking at because there are not three voices talking to me and three bodies trying to preform acrobatic stunts in the grocery cart. So there are many reasons why it is great.

But there are also reasons why it is terribly sad. It seems like I just gave birth to each of them and here they are ready and willing to leave me and go out into the world without me. I can't help but feel like time can be such a cruel thing because the days that are so hard and unfun, that you want to sprint by you, seem to stand still and yet the years that you want to hold onto, seem to fly from your grasp. I guess that I am just not quite ready to let go of them yet, and yet it is time. Dropping off Bryce just seems wrong. I can't believe that I am just supposed to leave him there without even a teacher knowing that he is there, so that he has to just fend for himself on the playground until the bell rings. What is he like 6 or something? Oh that's right he is. It just seems different without him around and it makes me realize what a big kid he is becoming. I know that I will miss him and yet I know that it is time for him to go and learn and become more and more of who the Lord created him to be. It will be a learning process for me about how I will fit into his school days. I want mornings to be great and yet there has already been mornings that I have lost my patience with the bunch of them. I want afternoons to be great and yet they just seem normal too. We need a new routine, a new normal. So we are working on it. It is also sad to be without my Ella, who I haven't spent much time away from at all so far in her little life. I can't help but be so happy for her though. She has waited so long for this day to be like Bryce and go to school. I know that she is already waiting for kindergarten. Look out world here she comes, all 29 pounds of her.

So we are finding our new normal. And my heart soars because of it and breaks because of it. This whole parent thing, man who knew it would be so hard.

Me and Halle left to eachother. Well Hall, there is no one I would rather be left with!