First day of school

Last Tuesday, August 23 was Aspen's first day of school. She is in First Grade this year, which brings several new changes for us. First of all, by "bus route" has shortened by one stop, since I no long er drive Aspen to school. She takes the real bus, which picks her up & drops her off at Sundance. I am now sharing bus duty with Jim, since he usually takes Aspen to the bus stop and picks her up. She also goes to school all day now, which means she is in class from 9 until 3:30. She doesn't like the fact that once she gets home, the day is practically over and she has so much less time to play. But, riding the bus is so far her favorite part of the day.

For the first 3 days, she woke up all on her own, got up & got dressed very quietly so she wouldn't wake Madi or Tysen up, got herself a bowl of Marshmallow Mateys, and even tried to brush out her own hair. It was so cute! On the first day, she was all ready to go by 7am. We don't even have to leave to take her to the bus until 8:15. She was just really excited! I was racking my brain, trying to figure out how to keep that going all year long.

This little guy was SOOO excited to "go to school" with Aspen! Unfortunately, he won't be going for a few more years... he just gets to be my carpooling buddy while I drive Madi every day. This is a picture of Tysen putting on his shoes. Of course, his shoes include every pair of shoes in the shoe box by the front door...

Unfortunately, Aspen had a little mis-hap on her way across the parking lot to get on the bus. She tripped on a piece of asphalt that was poking up, and went down, flat on her face. I don't know how she managed not to tear her pants at the knee, but she did get a good scrape on her elbow. This is her, trying to be brave for the picture, and for her first ride on the bus. She does have a friend who catches the bus at the same spot, so once she discovered that, it was much easier for her and now she just loves it. She has the same teacher for 1st grade that she had last year for Kindergarten, because her teacher moved up a grade. Aspen loved having her for Kindergarten, and her teacher was really great to work Aspen at an advanced level for reading. I have quite the little reader on my hands! She can sit for an hour or more, reading books to herself. I know I was never that way when I was her age!

Madi's first day of Preschool was today. Unfortunately I didn't get a single picture, yet. Aspen's enthusiasm for waking up early and getting herself ready for school has severely waned, and we had our first fight about it this morning. Some good things just don't last, I'm afraid.

Madi is going to the same school that she was at last year (Northridge) and she has the same teachers, minus one. So it is good to have the continuity for her, and I already know the drill in class and everything. I love her teachers, so I am thrilled that she is staying at the same school. Originally, we were going to have her just go on M-W-F this year- which would have been great, because I wouldn't be driving as much. But Madi needs to work with all the different therapists who come, and they all come on different days... so, we decided that rather than miss out on something, we should just have her go every day at first and see how it works out. We always have the option of cutting out a day later on if we want to. I was looking forward to having 2 days of no driving, but I've also decided to get a membership to a local Gym in Orem, so that I can go and work out while the girls are in school. I really, really miss taking exercise classes and am looking forward to being able to do that again.

In other news... we finally got our new car. It is a 2007 GMC Yukon... the silver one. We've had it here for about a week now (that was a HUGE fiasco, trying to get it shipped here from Cali.) and it is definitely bigger, or at least wider. Which makes it so much nicer for the 3 kids, whose carseats actually fit on the seat now. I went through withdrawal from the Acadia for a few days. We definitely traded luxury for space and I miss a lot of the extra features that the Acadia had. But the Yukon is much roomier, and it will be a really great car for the family, especially if we have more kids in the future.

So, there you have it!