The last first day of school. Ever.
The First of the Lasts
The last first day of school. Ever.
Yesterday marked an auspicious occasion here: it was the last first day of school for my youngest child who began his senior year of high school this week. After 24 years, I will no longer have an occasion to force a child to pose in front of our house wearing his or her backpack to commemorate the start of a new school year.
The tradition started when my oldest, who will turn 28 (!!) in October, was heading out for his first day of preschool -- all 2.5 hours -- in a church basement. I instructed him to stand on the front step of our house back then, under a vine of purple morning glories that had snaked their way up and around the front door all summer, to pose for a picture wearing his big backpack that I had his name "max" monogrammed on, and a name tag. But his sister, younger by 17 months and always trying to do eveything her big brother was doing, was confused and wanted to get into the picture as well. So I gave her my nametag and she climbed up on the step next to their brother and you would have thought the two of them just won the lottery or a trip to Disney World. One of the shots has him turning to look at her, who's still grinning straight ahead hard, and if you could put a cartoon bubble over his head, it would have said, "Annie, can you believe it? We're going to school."
Maybe ten or 11 years later, when everyone was briefly at separate schools with separate start dates, the oldest child had another look of incredulity on his face after I corralled him onto another front step for a traditional first day photo op, which later I realized also included him flipping me off. I guess high school wasn't as exciting as that basement preschool all those years earlier.
Yesterday, one of my Facebook "memories" was of a first-day-of-school photo sesh in the front of our house minus the older two kids, who were off at college, but with the addition of a best friend across the street, who appears in a number of our Back to School photo collages (she's also in all the prom and graduation picks, not to mention Halloween and the traditional Christmas-morning-in-the-street that she and my daughter celebrated by sitting in the middle of the road and exchanging gifts throughout high school).
I am reminded this year, with just a 17-year-old-boy still in school, of all the trips to Staples for supplies and haircuts and new sneakers and maybe Kids Gap for an outfit. Shopping online for backpacks with their names on them (before people worried about that kind of thing). My calendar jam packed with all of the fall sports and activities and back-to-school nights and upcoming half days. The endless, endless forms to fill out. The giant trip to Costco to stock up on juice boxes and snacks for lunchboxes and so much milk. The healthy breakfasts I would make every-single-morning. And the lunches I always seemed to forget -- no matter how long I'd been making them -- until one year I told the oldest three they were on their own.
As with everyone else who still has a child in school, this year looks so much different than anything leading up to it. My son's high school was supposed to start a "hybrid" model this week until temperature scanners failed to arrive, forcing the school to push back anyone entering the school, which he was scheduled to do today. The night before he was to log in to begin school remotely, he realized he could not access his schedule because he (I) had not paid for an International Baccalaureate (IB) class last year. Naturally, I go nuts and email at like 8:00 that night everyone from the head of guidance to the principal, demanding a copy of his schedule and blasting them for having such a flimsy system in place for communicating when your kid has money due.
In the end, one of his teachers sent him a screenshot of his schedule and later the next day, I heard from the woman who runs things like the IB program, who my younger daughter LOVED years earlier when she was a teacher, who apologized for the hold and that I never saw the three letters she sent out about the fees last year. When I reported I heard back from that former teacher to my daughter later, she asked, "Did she put you in your place?" and when I nodded she said, "Good. Somebody needed to."
Around 6am the next day, I realized it would be nice if I made my guy a breakfast for his first day, something I never do now, so I scrounged in the pantry and found some opened Trader Joe's protein pancake mix and luckily the bacon in the frig that wasn't too old. But there was like a drop of maple syrup left and not one chocolate chip in the baking drawer and let me tell you, I never NOT have chocolate chips in case pancakes are in order, which tells you a lot about the last time I made pancakes.
But the youngest is (relatively) easy and he shrugged his shoulders when I reported the dearth of syrup and then winced when I told him I'd substituted blueberries for the errant chips. He gobbled it all and then headed back to his cave to log in to his first day of senior year. He'd gotten out of the sweats he'd been favoring all summer when he wasn't bussing tables and donned his uniform consisting of a tshirt with the high school logo and matching basketball shorts. I even forgot to take his picture.
I always thought I'd be sad to see traditions like this end but now as I get older, I see that it's okay when chapters close. And to be honest, if they didn't come up in my Facebook feed as "memories," I can't remember when I last went down memory lane looking back at the kids' first days of school. And it would take work as they are scattered in so many places as things have evolved over the years. Some are in boxes in my office, some in photo albums, some are in the approximately 1 million photos stored in a "cloud" somewhere, and about four years' worth of pics disappeared when I stopped using the old Picasa and can't access because I changed my email address when I got divorced.
But I don't need to even see those pictures to remember in my mind what the kids looked like standing in front of the houses we have lived in. Lined up next to their siblings or standing alone. All of us, looking forward to what the new year would bring.
xoAmy
Friday Faves
I'm still on the blind hanging kick (or to be more precise: I order from Amazon and my daughter hangs them). She just put these up in my bedroom this morning and they are everything I wanted them to be. Will they block light from the streetlamp across the street that beats into my room when the leaves have fallen? Probably not. Do they look amazing. You betcha.
We bought these string lights from Costco a few weeks ago and hung them on these poles I got on Amazon and then BLASTED Hall & Oates "You Make My Dreams (Come True)" because truly, hanging cafe lights was the culmination of a lot of discussion about doing such since the beginning of the pandemic.
Do you have an overload of zucchini right now? Try this sheet pan chicken meatball dish for dinner.
My reading slowed down in August but it's picking up again. I just finished this, which is the first in a mystery series by the author of the novel, "Life After LIfe." It's fun!
