Once More, With Feeling

Look what we did this week!

Yep, back to school. Always a bit of a tough week in the PM house since the littles come home each day mentally exhausted and emotionally spent by all the newness of it, and they do tend to fall apart a bit when they hit the safety of home. Lots of love and lots of limits, I keep reminding myself.

You'll notice that they are not standing together. It's a big year for us, as we are in two different schools for the first time. It means a different start time (a whole hour earlier, have mercy) for The Girl. And a different bus stop.

And this whole middle school thing is quite the brave new world. I had to go school supply shopping for the first time (in elementary, we just pay 25 bucks and the school buys supplies to share). Oh my word - a red composition notebook wide-ruled 180 pages and a black folder with three dividers and a yellow three-subject notebook 100 pages and dry erase markers and erasable colour pencils and and and....

Oh, and a calculator that is a spaceship that costs almost $150. Apparently she can use it all through high school. (But honestly, it's not going to get lost sometime over the next seven years?)

(Thinking...maybe I can get away with buying only one and she and The Boy can share it, Laura and Mary Ingalls-style. They could plan their meeting times in the hallway to make the drop.)

She has to switch classes a hundred times a day. She gets no recess (boo). She only gets half of her classes in French. Although I'm grateful for even that; this is the only post-elementary immersion that we know of in the state.

Still, I think she will love it. Her BFF from her private school days transferred into this school, so they can finally see each other every day. The teachers seem to really get middle schoolers (oh my - it is a special age group and teaching them is not for the faint of heart, i.e. me). All the things that seem so scary now are the ones that will actually be her favourite once she gets into the rhythm and flourishes.

And The Boy? He doesn't even care. We've been getting shrugs and "it was fine" since our very first day of "how was school??"

A special mention of our back-to-school finery. This year we swapped fancy for funny:

They're definitely growing up.

Read more...