A New Chapter

Her lunch is all packed, and her uniform is laid out for tomorrow and she is FINALLY asleep.  She usually doesn't go down at night without a fight and tonight was no exception.



The first day of school butterflies, to be sure.  But whether or not they are jitters or if it's just all around excitement, I don't quite know.  When I was her age, it was jitters all the way (even through my first days of new classes in college!), but thankfully not much seems to make this girl scared.  I certainly don't want to plant those ideas of nervousness in her head, so I don't ask if she's nervous.  I ask if she's excited, and I get all sorts of yeses combined with jumping up and down.

She starts school Friday and yesterday, we fit in a last minute trip to the coast.  We've been talking about it for awhile and the days and weeks just seemed to be getting away from us, so it hadn't happened yet.   My mom encouraged us to make it happen, so we did.  And I am so glad we did.

Because they had SO much fun.  My one regret is not packing their swimsuits.  I am sure you are thinking you went to the beach and you didn't pack swimsuits?  But hear me out.  This is the Pacific NW.  The high for the day was supposed to be 65*.  And our ocean water?  NOT warm. At all. (It hovers around the high 50's this time of year, which to me sounds absolutely miserable!)

But I forget my kids are not my kids when it comes to water activities.  They are their father's children through and through, loving any and all water related recreational activities.  Like I said, that is so not me.  My idea of good recreation is a Netflix marathon.

You think I'm kidding. 

It ended up being such a nice day and the kids were taking off their overprotective mom gear (rubber boots, socks, sweatshirts....) and rolling up their pants within minutes of getting out on the sand.

To put it simply, they played for hours.  And thankfully they have a daddy who loves it just as much as they do.

This mama was content to take pictures and try and record as many memories as possible.  In other related news, I was also the pack mule, carrying my purse (never leave it in the car anymore, not after having my car broken into and my purse stolen from said car) and their shoes and sweatshirts and camera bag.

Thankfully I had a decent excuse for not taking off my boots while on the beach.  Not really--I tripped the other day and ripped off half my big toenail.  Ouch!!! It's still very much in the early healing stages, so I was not about to get all kinds of sand in it.  So for me, the boots stayed on.

I wanted to get a fun jumping up and down picture of all of them.  They gave it their best effort to be sure, but the timing was never quite right.  However, lots of laughs were gained in the process--and that was priceless!!

It was a great bookend to our summer.

As for tomorrow, it's a new beginning......