Back to School. For EVERYONE.

Speaking of repeating cycles (as we were ... in a previous post), I ought to mention that the kids went back to school. 

Goldie, of course, is still missionarying away (and will be for another six months). But Abe is back at BYU for his final year. Daisy is back at BYU for her fifth year (first year as a graduate student!). And all seven of the remaining children are scattered about (quite literally if you look at how far apart their schools are situated) throughout high school, middle school and elementary. (I should have liked, after all the frightening newness of last year, for this going back year to all seem perfectly familiar. However, it was Anders' first go at middle school. And Starling's first go with school at all. So it still felt like lots of daunting newness this year.)

Anyway. The return to school seems worth always mentioning (if for no other reason than to post the first-day-of-school front porch photos), but particularly this year seems worth noting as it is the first time in nearly 24 years (!!!) that I have a block of time in my days with no toddlers or babies at my feet.

Penny and Jesse drive to school--and drop Anders at his school on the way (it's weird that he was heading to school with all the little kids every morning last year and is suddenly heading off with the teens this year), but I made them all take the bus the first two days so that Anders would be familiar with it for days when they need to use it.

I don't really know what to say about this rather landmark moment. A simple "woohoo, my kids are all in school" doesn't feel true to my feelings. There's some sense of loss and of stages of life slipping out of my hands. There is also a feeling that this phase is a gift, and I ought to appreciate and make really worthwhile use of it. There's this constant desire to keep them safely in Eden forever warring with this business of letting them stretch onward and outward--tasting the bitter to better know the sweet.

But I think mostly there's just sort of a feeling of ... awe? shock? wonder? 

It's not as if my kids are raised. We have miles to go before we sleep and all that. But, as I take my kids to school these days, I see many young mothers with a kindergartner and perhaps a 2nd grader. They'll have another toddler in tow as well, and I see that they are just at the beginning of all this mothering business. For most of them this will be a fairly short phase of all of their children going through this stage at roughly the same time. And it just boggles my mind--it seems impossible--that I was them twenty years ago. And yet I have been in that stage continuously ever since. Just ... welcoming new babies, having toddlers underfoot, navigating new phases with our older children (graduations, and missions, and college) all while buckling car seats, and being woken all night, and nursing babies. Parenting very small children has been such an enormous part of my life experience. And, with this new phase of kids in school (mind you Starling is only there for three hours), but with this new stage, I sense a little bit the miracle of how far I've come--just day by tiny day, a step at a time, as we've managed to do this impossible and wonderful and exhausting thing for 24 years. 

I don't know that I'm making any sense. But this is one of those times that is causing me to reflect on all sorts of things that I was, for so long, just so much in the thick of, that I couldn't yet see them from this slightly new perspective. I even feel like I'm viewing my own self over the last 24 years from an outside perspective. 

Anyway. Perhaps more later. Perhaps not. I don't know. We shall see. In the meantime here's little kindergartner home and eating a pear. (She likes to pack a little lunch to take to school in her backpack just like her siblings ... even though she doesn't actually stay at school long enough to eat it.)