And now September

And so it has begun again. Though the mornings now find me harriedly rifling the fridge for suitable lunch pail inclusions, bellowing up the stairs for my sleeping beauties to rise and shine, and making a dash at Corin's bedhead before we suit up for the 8:06 bus, I am welcoming back the school year. The kids are now settled into their second week of school. The downside of first grade according to the two-week veteran is definitely the nightly homework. "Who invented this?" Corin asks every night, scratching at his paper with a pencil, his chin in his hand. On the other hand, the upside of first grade is clearly classroom pets. Currently Mrs. Carter's first grade has a tarantula named Cupcake Twinkle. The other day, Corin informed me that female tarantulas sometimes eat their male counterparts. I could see he was having trouble fitting this information from the wild world of arachnids into his gender norms. Girls like pink. Girls play princesses. Girl tarantulas eat boy tarantulas. Something does not compute, my schemas are breaking apart. I am told Cupcake Twinkle is soon to be joined, presumably in another cage, by a bearded dragon, name yet unknown. I guess a poisonous saucer-sized spider and a nearly-mythical creature go a long way to easing the blow of nightly homework. Corin found another nice thing about first grade - you can borrow the same books from the school library as you did last year - like meeting up with an old friend, right? Tim and I were so glad to be reuninted with our favorite bedtime reading after a summer of respite. What did we do without "Anakin's Race to Freedom" for all those months?

Seth started back to preschool, though he'd be the first to tell you that he is no longer in an Early Childhood class, but is in Pre-K. School is his Cheers, though it is Seth that knows everyone's name. When Tim and I took him over the first day, he walked down the long hall to his classroom, waving left, waving right, greeting everyone we passed by name. One would think he hadn't been gone from these folks for months. When he had hung his coat, stowed his lunch pail and put on his slippers, he dived right into some serious purple playdough. Tim and I couldn't get him to look up from chatting with his pals to hear our goodbyes. When I arrived to pick him up at the end of that first day, he had given my friend, who had signed him out for me, the slip. While she was engaged in getting her daughter's shoes on, Seth made for the door with a friend. It had just been raining and I soon found him under a downspout "taking a shower." He was soaked through and ran off laughing when I tried to curb him toward the car. There's just nothing like getting back into routine.

So September, welcome back. And welcome back, crisp mornings at the bus stop, dinnertime descriptions of recess escapades, half eaten sandwiches and untouched vegetables at the bottom of the lunch bag. Welcome back, children proud of something they just mastered, children who have stretched themselves, children who fall into bed, spent but happy. Welcome back, school.