Kindergarten

Ree is already on her fourth week of kindergarten, and she is still loving it. She pretty much likes everything about it, and this is the happiest I have seen her in a long, long time. (Not that she was unhappy before; she is just glowing now.) We are going to enjoy this enchantment while it lasts!

On the other hand, the rest of us are still adjusting. We are suddenly having to get another person out the door by 6:55 each morning. And the silly school district insists on having school five days a week, which just does not work with our family's previously established slacker four-day work week. I am typically a morning person, and until Ree started kindergarten, I could count on one hand the number of times I had overslept in my life. I've already overslept twice on kindergarten days, and both times were due to me sleeping right through my alarm. Granted it's not the loudest (I use my cell phone on vibrate on a flat surface so as not to disturb Natalia if she is within a city block of the alarm), but it normally wakes me every day. I even woke up the same way when Leon and Michael were newborns. And I know I was tired then!

But there are some benefits to the new schedule too. I have to make Ree's lunch at night, and consequently I am making my lunch at night instead of scrambling to grab containers of leftovers in the morning. And because we are planning for her lunches, we actually have a lot more lunch food and fruit in the house, which we are all benefiting from. Never knowing when Natalia will wake up (and insist on being held until I peel her off me as I walk out the door), I get ready for work before I get Ree up. That gives me time to sit down and eat breakfast at the table with her each day. I haven't eaten a weekday breakfast at the table since college.

I drop Ree off at the bus on my way to work. On mornings when we have extra time, she actually chooses to head to the bus early rather than play. We then get some time to just talk and watch the sunrise and the cars go by. And that is a wonderful way to start the day. It even almost makes up for the early mornings.