First Day of School

And so it begins again.

After the Best Summer Ever (tm), there is the autumn.  It’s that whole “season” thing – winter, spring, summer, fall, regular as clockwork and, like most of my clocks, gradually shifting later and later.  The days start to get a bit shorter.  The weather gets, um, well, not really all that much cooler actually, climate change being what it is these days, but you get the feeling that it ought to be cooler and that has to count for something. 

And it’s Back To School time for everybody.

For me and Kim, this means frantically checking our syllabi and handouts, prepping our lectures and discussions, and, in my case, trying to figure out how to work the newly updated course website system that the Central Office in charge of Home Campus has installed, because it’s now Optimized For Your Convenience, which means that everything you used to know about how to make it work no longer applies – or worse, it almost applies, so you can proceed toward your goal with blithe confidence until you get to the third-from-the-last step and discover that your preferred option no longer exists.  Or, rather, it does exist, but you can’t get there from here.  So sorry.  Better luck next time. 

For the girls, it means the annual rituals of the beginning of the school year.  We’ve gotten them both registered – an online process now, here in Our Little Town.  We went to the various introductory days and conferences, meeting teachers, listening to videos from administrators, trying to scrunch our adult-sized bodies into those tiny elementary school chairs.

And today was The Day – the first real day of school.

This means one more annual ritual: the First Day of School Photograph.  Sad how traumatized they look.  Well, that’s what you get for jacking them out of bed at the crack of dawn for the first time since June.

I cannot believe that they are so big now.  Tabitha is in 7th grade now, down at Mighty Clever Guy Middle School, and taller than her mother by a good margin.  Lauren has entered 4th grade at Not Bad President Elementary and for the first time has a teacher that her sister had before her, though in a different grade.  They marched off into the grey and threatening weather, a remnant of last night’s storms, and made their way to school.

Apparently they survived, as they were there when I went to pick them up this afternoon.  They were full of the news of the day – who is in their class or pod, what activities they were up to on the first real day of school, and so on.  We went out for our annual celebratory dinner, because the first day of school is in fact something to celebrate.

Good luck, ladies.  The world is yours for the taking.