Curse Words, Independence, and Sponge Bob

Welcoming Brandon home has made for the busiest, best month. I thought I was busy when I was parenting three kids by myself, but he got home from deployment just over a month ago and came right before my brother who lives in Utah came to visit for over a week, and we had a mini-family reunion to Florida. That was followed by 4th of July, a holiday which we love, then just a few days later another one of my brother’s from out of town came to visit with his family for a week, and then two days after they leave we will be on the road again out to sunny Utah for a family reunion on Brandon’s side which we are so excited about. We’ll come home from that trip just in time for Sawyer’s first meet the teacher. I can’t believe he’s starting Kindergarten this year. I can barely even think about it, better yet talk about it.

While I was visiting with my Mom this evening she told me that when my oldest brother started Kindergarten, she had such a hard time dropping him off and cried for most of the day and just waited until it was time to go get him. It made me feel better that even my Mom, who is super woman (she raised 6 kids and handles everything like it’s no big deal. She’s amazing) had a hard time with seeing her kids go off to school for the first time. We have spent a lot of time wrestling with sending him off to Kindergarten this year. He has a few needs that can make school harder for him, and so I considered homeschooling, delaying Kindergarten, or sending him to a smaller school, but after a lot of prayer and talk we decided to go forward with sending him to our local public school. We live in an amazing school district, our elementary school feeds into one of the best high schools in the state, and he will have four cousins attending at the same school, lots of friends, and just to make it even more fun, it’s the same elementary school that I attended. When weighing in his needs though, we had heavily considered sending him to a new charter school that has opened in the area, which would have been a lot more work for me (it’s about a half hour drive with no buses), because I thought he might get more individualized attention there. However, after talking to a few of the teachers I know personally who have taught at our local public school and going through it all over and over in my head (hello late nights with no husband home and nothing else to distract my mind), we decided that we felt good about starting at the public school and if we felt like we need to move him in the future than we will.

I am a big fan of supporting public schools and the one we have near us is so good, so so good. It would almost be silly of us not to put him there, and I’m so looking forward to seeing him learn and grow and enjoy school. As a kid, I always loved school and I adored back to school season- the excitement, the shopping for fresh new pencils and supplies, the new outfit, it was all so fun. I can’t wait to get started doing all of that with him, but I also want time to just slow down a little, especially since we do have so much going on before school starts (did I mention that a week after school starts we will have ten people staying at our house during Brandon’s cousin’s wedding week???? Fun and exciting but a lot of prep work!) I need time to just soak in my little guy before be grows up so much, and there are only three Saturdays left before he walks through those school doors. My goal is just to be able to take a step back and slow down while I enjoy my last few days without a school-aged kid who is still oblivious to curse words, independence, and Sponge Bob.