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Today is the last Monday of the school year. I don’t know who is happier – me or the boys. For me, it means that I don’t have to get up at 5:30 in the morning unless I want to. For the boys, it’s the second to last day of exams and that much closer to summer vacation. In either event, believe it or not, it was in the 40s here this morning…..quite cool considering we are at the day before the official beginning of summer. Kids are hanging around here in sweat jackets.
Good thing that I actually looked at the calendar last night. The school calendar. Seems that kids have school tomorrow. Who would have guessed? Silly me, I was thinking it was a holiday. Of course the boys were well aware that they were headed back to school tomorrow from vacation — good thing someone was on top of things. It evidently wasn’t me.
Everyone seemed to survive their first week back at school. “Hell week” at soccer came to a close about an hour and a half ago and there are survivors. Driving around it’s hard to sometimes remember that it isn’t fall – that for a lot of people school is still a distant memory. People are still on vacation and Labor Day (the “official” end of summer) isn’t for another week. The weather this week has felt autumn-y and with everyone being back on a school schedule, it’s just easy to forget about summer and start thinking, crisp nights, fires in the woodstove, apples and pumpkins.
Today was an absolutely beautiful day and from what I see, tomorrow is supposed to remind us that summer hasn’t left just yet. The tomatoes will be happy for some heat and maybe they will react by starting to ripen a little. Tomatoes like heat and this week just hasn’t delivered.
Today is Kiss and Make Up day. Seriously. I really wish I knew where some of these holidays came from, but I checked several different sites and it’s official. What the heck though whether or not you’ve got anything to make up for, I’m a fan of kissing – so why not give it a whirl.
It’s also a National Banana Split Day – not much of a banana split fan. I prefer my ice cream in small batches and no fruit needs to be involved or injured to make me happy – just lots of chocolate and nuts. I am however a fan of The Banana Splits -remember them?
It’s also the start of school for us here in the upper reaches of the country. Two thirds of the children left the house this morning before 7 a.m. — everyone leaves tomorrow. Normalcy (haha) returns to the house – like that will ever happen.
This week has just been….well…crazy. Exams are all this week, so anything that I do has been interrupted by three different kids asking me to help them study something. I don’t mind, but that…combined with 1/2 day pickups and the regular running around – lessons, appointments, etc. has just about made this week nearly impossible to actually get work done. And work I do have….so I just finished researching caselaw for a legal memo that I have to finish tomorrow, somewhere in between trucking kids back and forth, dentist’s appointments and laundry….I see the end of the week, I see the end of school, it’s so close….and yet by the way I feel tonight so very, very far away.
This is the last week for school. Exams this week and then school’s out. Summer will be upon us. I woke up this morning and thought that I actually saw some sunshine. Now that I’m actually up and moving around though, it’s not really all that sunny out at all. In fact, it’s rather gray…it’s just not raining—yet.
We received a call at 5:30 this morning from the automated alert system in the school district advising us that the entire district was closed down this morning for a snow day. The first snow day of the season is always pretty exciting and by the looks of it, this is going to be a good day to be inside, prepping for Christmas and maybe doing some baking.
I remember when we were in NJ and as class mother it was one of my job duties to call all the other parents in the class to advise them when there was a snow day. The variety of responses told a lot about the people, whether they realized it or not. There were those that I could tell I had woken up and they digested the information with that sleepy glaze in their voice. There were those, who you could tell were too serious for their own good, who sounded annoyed and disgusted. And then there were my favorites, the ones who sounded so excited, so happy, still retaining the childlike amazement of a snow day. Of course, there were those that, even at 5:30 or 6 a.m. didn’t even answer their phone. I often wondered if they didn’t care enough to find out who was calling or they weren’t home. In any event, those were usually the ones that were upset when they trotted their children all the way to school in less than ideal conditions to find it closed and decided that it was their right to complain.
When we moved here, we had to prep the boys and explain to them that this wasn’t going to be like New Jersey. People in Vermont were used to snow and it was expected and normal in the winter here, so snow days wouldn’t be like in NJ where even the forecast of some snow was enough to scare them into closing the schools. Today for example, they are predicting 60 mile per hour winds and 9 inches of snow with the possibility of ice thrown in there for good measure. We will probably lose power at some point, I will be surprised if we don’t.
This is what is it looking like out our window this morning.
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It’s been that kind of week. It has been a whirlwind. We have had 6 soccer games, two open houses, scouts, meetings and a school dance. Dinner has been an afterthought or a between thought or not a thought at all. The games have been home and away (simultaneously I might add – which makes it very difficult) so each of us has been going in a different direction. Tom has taken the after work games (usually at home) and I have done the “away” games which today is down in Dorset. This means that I won’t be back here until at least 6:45-7.
I’d like to say that we can at least look forward to a relaxing weekend, but it doesn’t seem like that is happening either. Ce la vie.
The air was downright chilly here this morning. I did in fact see people sporting coats, jackets and sweaters. Fall is in the air and I keep looking for the first signs of leaves changing. It seems that as abruptly as summer finally arrived, it is also leaving Vermont. I don’t mind since autumn is one of my favorite times of the year. School seems like a success since everyone returned yesterday in happy moods with smiles, eager to chatter on about their new teachers, classes, and the like.
I am still in the process of reassembling everything in the house after vacation preceded by weeks of various different camps and activities. Maybe things will be all in their place soon.
Relaxation is over. The RVs have been returned and the vacation is but a memory. Today I am wading through the contents of two trailers, plus all of the kids’ clothes and paraphernalia that has been accumulating in our den/laundry room through the summer, the canoe trip, the week at scout camp, the soccer camps, the electronics camp and now finally, vacation. Add to the mix, just for fun, the fact that our house is undergoing some renovations at the same time, and literally I cannot find a thing. I hope that someday I will find the things that I have pretty much given up on locating, figuring that they are the things that are hidden well underneath the piles that have been growing here and there.
Be that as it may, tomorrow is the first day of school. For the little one (relaxing so nicely in the photo above) tomorrow is his first day in middle school. For the oldest, it is the first day of high school. (Boy, do I feel old – high school!). The middle guy is entering 8th grade. Everyone is well back in the swing of things as soccer practice started for the 7th and 8th graders yesterday and TJ rejoined his team yesterday after coming back from vacation. Tomorrow is his first scrimmage. We have left the comfort and ease of summer’s lazy days for the more hectic, crazy days of school and fall sports. Our days are no longer our own, but at least we went out with a nice, lazy week at the beach.
I love the fall, the start of school, the beginning of a new year of sorts. I guess that it is perpetual student in me that thinks the year starts more at the beginning of the school year rather than at new year’s. Oh, and by the way, the weather tends to agree since evenings are forecast to dip into the 30s on Thursday night. Brrr…winter cannot be far behind.
I have been beside myself for several days since our middle son, who was so anxious to go to his new middle school, came home after one class both mornings since he had been vomiting. This is classic for him, and we immediately thought it was anxiety or something more to it than “I just don’t feel well”. The school, on the other hand, kept telling us that there was a stomach bug going around and several children had been sent home for the same reason. Persistence and parental instinct paid off with a meeting wherein his science teacher recounted an episode where he was upset over not being properly prepared for class. While I love all the good things that the boys got from their catholic school education, this anxiety that Tyler developed is certainly not one of them. He developed a fear that if everything is not exactly perfect he will get in trouble and proceeds to get himself so upset that he physically becomes ill.
We have worked out a resolution now that we know what the problem is, so hopefully things will get better. He survived a whole day in school yesterday which is a MAJOR accomplishment.
