The First Week is Always the Hardest…
Posted By AmyD. on August 25, 2010
Today marks the third day of the new school year. We’re also experiencing above average temps here, so while Katie looked adorable the first day by day 2 and day 3 she was throwing on shorts, light weight shirts and bounding out the door with her hair in a pony tail. While her older sibling approached the new school year warily as a college freshman unsure of what to expect, Katie has eagerly been anticipating the start of the new school year for the past couple of weeks.
Katie is our resident genius, although her brother is certainly no slouch and Maggie, while eccentric, certainly doesn’t seem to be trailing far behind either of them. That being said, the shift of routines from lazy summer days to early starts, long days, and homework are rapidly wearing on our heroine. This morning, while still in a hurry to get to school as soon as possible, the spring in Kate’s step was noticeably less than it was on the first day of school.
Still Katie is the last one to show the wear and tear of the first week. Yesterday morning I pulled Maggie out of bed, stood her on her feet, made sure she could stand and left her to get dressed only to hear later from her sister that she promptly walked straight into a wall while trying to exit the bedroom. Maggie is not a morning person she never has been. She’s short on enthusiasm for anything that requires her being awake before 8am.
A Sophomore in high school, Katie had her classes memorized, efficient stops to and from her locker carefully mapped out, and had neatly filed away each syllabus from each class by the evening of the first day. She’s also created a list of any school supplies she’s missing and God knows she’s probably color coded them as well. I should have named her Katie “Enthusiastic” Doran. She’s happy to be back around her friends and even though she has some tough classes she loves it all.
Katie took PE over the summer which means she doesn’t have to take it over the course of the school year and it leaves room for her to get ahead academically instead. It also means I don’t have to worry about buying new PE clothes, shoes, socks, etc. and she doesn’t have to manage the combination locks to two different lockers. That gym locker routine gets pretty old after a while.
For Ethan the days of school lockers are far behind him and I think that’s the least of what he’s happy about. I have to admit that while his enthusiasm doesn’t quite match Kate’s he nonetheless is approaching the new school year with more enthusiasm than I have seen in a long time. But, given how his last two years have gone I can’t blame him, I’m just thrilled to see him excited again.
Miss Maggie, our resident first grader, has established her list of likes and dislikes early on:
Math – 
Language Arts – 
Phonics – 
History –
Science –
PE –
Spanish –
Art –
So far so good. We’ve got back to school over with, now we can look forward to fall and some cooler temps finally!
My old house had hard wood floors. It took us over a week to refinish them. I really loved them. Our current house has tile and carpet. The carpet was the standard carpet that you got with the house, we didn’t upgrade because the cost of the upgrade was more than what it would have cost to have the entire house re-carpeted by a local company with better carpet than the upgrades the builder offered. /eye roll
