The End of the Year

School let out on Friday, and that makes Tabitha officially a middle-schooler and Lauren officially a third-grader.

I am not entirely sure how this happened.

Well, yes, I know how it happened – we keep feeding them and sending them to school and they keep eating and doing their assignments and it all works out – but still, I’m not entirely sure how so much time has gone by so quickly. It’s the Standard Parental Response to this sort of thing, and I’m going to wallow in it for a while.

Just wait until they get married. Won’t that be a trip and a half?

It was a good year for them. Tabitha was a safety – they wear yellow vests down at Not Bad President Elementary these days rather than the orange belts that were popular when I was in grade school. Lauren was on the Student Council. Both had significant roles in their class plays, and both won the school citizenship award, for which they had to be nominated by their teachers. Both have won it before. They made good friends, did well on their report cards, and generally made me proud beyond all measure.

So of course we have been celebrating a bit.

Our first stop was to the mall-sprawl on the northern edge of Our Little Town, where Tabitha chose as her prize a giant barrel of cheese puffs (now mostly gone), while Lauren got something gooey and sticky as well as a resin zebra for her collection of “sculptures.” And we had dinner at the buffet place, where we can get an astonishing variety and quantity of fair-to-middling food for a reasonable sum. We got there a bit early and so were surrounded by young children and old people, and we had a grand time.

Saturday was the annual Sorting Ritual, which has nothing to do with Gryffindor vs. Slytherin and everything to do with taking the immense pile of paper that each girl has generated since September and dividing it into two smaller piles – Keep and Recycle. It’s fun to go through all that old stuff, and we try to limit the Keep pile to things like stories and art rather than math homework. Someday they might want to read their old stories again. Not even math teachers want to see their old multiplication worksheets.

Tomorrow it will be Monday and nobody here has to wake up early. The girls are off and their other commitments haven’t picked up yet. My summer class doesn’t start until the 21st and is a night class anyway. I’ve got a list of things I need to do that’s two single-spaced pages long, but none of them require me to be anywhere early on a Monday morning. Kim only gets paid to go in on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the summer, and while she will likely end up volunteering a lot of her time anyway it will not be tomorrow.

So we’re going to enjoy our time with each other.

Schoooooooooool’s out! For! Summer!

And yes, one of the things I need to do is introduce Tabitha to the original for that song. Perhaps I will do that now.