Adjusting to Daily Life

We're back to the school daily grind. No more reminiscing about our Boston trip. Eric and Natalie go back and forth to school on the bus every day. Patrick takes Alex to school in the morning, and I take him home after work.

Of course this first week didn't exactly follow that pattern since I was off work on Monday and I had to work late on Tuesday, so Patrick picked up Alex on both of those days. Alex has also started ramping up his social schedule again. He stayed after school on Tuesday to go to a pep rally for the first football games of the season. Tonight Patrick drove him to the football game on Thursday night. He has been swamped with homework from day one, so I hope that's been a nice break for him. Patrick really misses our extra driver, aka Anthony.

I took this picture of Eric on Wednesday. I found this Darth Vader battery-operated toothbrush on one of our many trips to Target, so of course I had to get it for him. It's a bit cumbersome since you have to keep pressing the red button to make it turn on, but he loves it since he currently loves Star Wars, even if he has to use two hands to operate it.

I've been holding it together since dropping Anthony off at school, but I started really missing him on Wednesday night when he said he didn't want to come home during his Midterm Break at the end of October. I work with the mother of one of his high school friends and on Thursday, we commiserated with each other. It doesn't help that Anthony isn't very descriptive about his life. On Tuesday, I asked him if he was making friends. He texted me back this picture. He was apparently in one of the common rooms on the second floor of his dorm, one of the girls' floors. At least a picture is worth a thousand words. Although I was still left wondering who all of these people were, at least this was better than his standard one word answer--"Yes".

One of our good friends, Gary, texted me on Wednesday about how he enjoyed a line from one of my previous blog posts about how I am now my mother by wrapping up cookies for Anthony. He told me, "She would be proud!" He also asked how I was doing, because his daughter also just left for college and she decided not to come home for the Labor Day weekend. He was also having a tough time coping with her absence. I texted him back, "We raised independent children, right Gary?" He replied, "We did and not it is biting us. LOL." Yes, we raised independent children and we are happy for them. We just have to make some adjustments of our own.