First Day of School 2015

Today was the first day of school for the younger kiddos. Anthony starts school up in Worcester on Thursday. Eric is starting third grade, Natalie is in eighth grade, and Alex is a junior in high school--yet another year where I have all the kids in different schools. Eric and Natalie still take the bus to school and Patrick usually drops Alex off at school since there is not bus that goes from our neighborhood to his school. Today, since I was off work, Patrick and I both took Alex and then went to the gym.

Eric wore a dinosaur shirt today. I thought he was going to wear a Star Wars Rebels shirt since he has a Star Wars Rebels backpack, but he is not one to plan what he wears anyway. We got him the backpack at the end of last year, so it's still basically new. Every year I take a photo of him with his backpack, and have him look over his shoulder. This made him giggle this year, and I love that you can see his missing teeth in this photo.

For the first year in eight straight years of one of our kids going to this particular elementary school, we didn't get a card in the mail to tell us what number the bus is and what time it's coming. There was some notice about looking that info up online. The bus has come around the same time in eight years, so we went to the bus stop at about the same time we usually do. There were no other kids at the bus stop. This isn't really that unusual on the first day of school, when a lot of parents drive their kids to school instead of making them take the bus, especially when they have to lug school supplies with them.

The bus arrived around 7:04am the last few years, although our bus driver tends to be early, so that's why we usually get out there by around 7am. Again, this is different on the first day of school--they usually run late on the first day. We waited out there until around 7:10. I was getting worried that maybe the bus had gotten there a lot earlier and that we missed it. I talked to Eric about possibly driving him to school. He was fine with that, so when 7:10 rolled around, he headed back home. Patrick looked up the bus schedule, and found out at about 7:16 that the bus was supposed to arrive at 7:14. By that point, I was trying to coax Natalie into letting me take a first day of school photo of her, so Patrick rushed out to the bus stop with Eric. The bus had indeed already come by, but they waited across the street from the bus stop so she could pick Eric up on the way out. Sigh--not a great start, but Eric was not fazed by it, so it was all good.

Natalie's bus info was the same as last year, so she went out as per usual. She wore her Junior Honor Society shirt to school. They have to wear uniforms at their middle school--white polo shirt or "spirit shirt" (which means a school shirt or school organization shirt), and navy pants/skirt/shorts. She used the same backpack as the last few years. I'm surprised that it's last this long with how rough she is with it. She was not excited about school today because she got her period yesterday and the second day is usually when she gets bad cramps. She's not at swim practice tonight for that reason.

I realized that I didn't include Alex's backpack in his first day of school photo, so I'll have to take a picture of that separately. He actually got a new backpack this year. He used Eric's old dinosaur backpack last year. This is the first year since middle school where he has had "short" hair also. I think he looks more grown up with that haircut.

Once again, I made Eric pose while holding a photo of last year's first day of school photo, holding a photo of the previous year's first day of school photo and so on. I should have made the photos bigger in the past, because you an't really appreciate the previous years, but it's too late to change that now. I'm going big next year!

I thought tonight was going to be a bit more hectic than it ended up being. I took Eric to Baskin Robbins for a traditional ice cream on the first day of school. Natalie's bus arrived soon after we got home, but after Patrick had left to go pick up Alex. She wasn't interested in going out for ice cream. I took Eric to Jiu Jitsu class from 5-6pm. We were just leaving when Patrick got home with Alex. He would have had to leave again with Natalie to practice when Eric and I were getting home, but we didn't have to do that. That means that we get to watch Mythbusters as a family while eating dinner. It's a nice end to the first day of school.