Today Josiah bounded off happily for his very first day of Kindergarten and Chloe to 3rd grade. He has been so excited I wasn’t worried about him getting too nervous–and I was right. He’s much more bold than Chloe was at his age. It also helps that he has an older sister who can tell him exactly what to expect, and will sit with him on the bus and help him find his class when they get to school…
So we were all up nice and early getting ready and working on their before school list. They were so excited that we finished everything quite early and had enough time to take a few pictures, walk to the bus stop leisurely and we STILL ended up about 12 min. early.
Maddie really wanted to be a part of the pictures too, even though she doesn’t understand. She kept asking “Where Chloe go?” for about an hour after they got on the bus.
Tim was able to come home a little early and pick up the kids from the bus stop to walk them home. They both seemed to have a spectacular day. Josiah has Mrs. Connell, which is the same Kindergarten teacher that Chloe had and LOVED. She’s really awesome. However, she has also been battling breast cancer this past year and is just finishing up treatment (I think she’s to the radiation part now) so she’ll be missing a little bit of school in the first couple weeks of class. It will make for a slightly disjointed start to Josiah’s school year, but Josiah is over the moon about being able to have Mrs. Connell (as are we) that it’s totally worth it.
It was quite chilly this morning so we had to wear coats. September weather can be so funny. Sometimes it’s crazy hot and sometimes you need to dig out the fall coats… at least for the morning.
One more random tidbit of information… It took Chloe weeks to gain the courage to take hot lunch at school and go through the lunch line. And even now, she really dislikes going through the lunch line. She takes cold lunch every day, which is actually fine since I would prefer her to do that. But just to show you how different Chloe and Josiah are… he forgot to bring home his lunchbox today, so I told him he might need to take a hot lunch tomorrow and he instantly said yes! No hesitation. No worries. No drama. That boy sometimes just cracks me up.
Sometimes it cracks ME up how much Chloe is like I was, despite the fact that she seems so confident. Things like going through the lunch line were an absolute terror to me in grade school. I mean, someone might talk to me and I wouldn’t know what to say, or I might not do it “right,” and I’d feel dumb. Don’t worry – she’ll grow out of it, but it might take a long time. What ultimately helped me out of that was being encouraged to focus on other people and how I could make them feel better, rather than focusing on myself and what I might do wrong.