Five and a half years of laughter, silliness, deep questions, lunch-time conversations, lego marathons and morning farm adventures zipped up his backpack for his first day of Kindergarten. He was excited, I was terrified. The day before, I reviewed in my head over and over how in the heck we were going to get out the door by 7:30 am to get to school on time, and then what in the world little brother and I were going to do with ourselves in the absence of our favorite sparkly five year old. What if someone was mean to him? What if he missed me? What if Titus realized that he doesn't like being with mommy all by himself? I was a big weepy ball of stress that needed to make jam. Seriously, sometimes you just need to make jam. So I did. I walked all the way to the end of the road and scoured those bushes like a mad woman (it's been a bad year for blackberries around here), falling into the thorns more than a few times. I filled up my lime green Easter basket to the top and sweated my way home. The end result: 8 jars of beautiful blackberry jam (which the guys are NUTS about) and one tired mommy who really didn't feel better about the Kindergarten thing at all but felt nice about having some jam stored away.
Of course, everything worked out fine. Moses loved his first week of school, though we are all still adjusting to waking up, eating breakfast, and leaving the house well before 8 am. I still miss him at lunch time, but am treasuring the alone time with little brother, who seems to like it too. Congratulations to all you other mommies who have survived the first few weeks of school - it sure is hard to let them go, isn't it?
