Back to School!

Amelia and Cooper started school yesterday! Tuesday Rexburg had the Party in the Park again. Cooper and I went off on our own because Amelia had a "date" with a few of her friends to hang out together at the party. Here a few pictures of my darlins:

Amelia with two of her friends. I continuously forget how small she is until I see her next to other girls her age!

This isn't a great picture, but this is a game Amelia was playing. If you fell off the platform, you were out. They had a huge ball you could thrown at others to try and knock them off while jumping from platform to platform. Amelia was in there for five minutes, through a rotation of fifteen children. She may be small, but she's a scrapper!

Mady and Amelia.

Cooper digging for treasure. 

One of the games, as always, is the bull-riding. Cooper was so incredibly focused it was funny:

Wednesday morning the kids were up early and ready in record time. They both looked so cute and grown-up!

Amelia's school starts 30 minutes later than Cooper's, so we dropped him off first. He ran half a block ahead of me, shouted hello to the new principal who looked a little shell-shocked, and sprinted into the school. He called hello to his 1st grade teacher and continued staright to his new room. By the time I got here, he'd given his teacher the Kleenex and Clorox wipes, introduced himself, reminded her she'd called Amelia Curly-Q (Amelia had her for 2nd grade trades), hung up his backpack and was running out to recess. I managed to stop him, take a hurried, blurry picture and he was off. No confidence problems with THAT kid!

I walked back to the car and started toward the middle school. Amelia was awfully quiet so I asked her if she wanted me to go in with her. She said yes. We parked at the school and I walked her in. The good news is that five other mothers were doing the same thing. We got to her classroom, I told her I'd see her at the bus stop tonight and to have a good day. She just stared at me for a bit and then said in a very tiny voice, "I think I'm a little nervous."  Just about broke my heart. By then her teacher had come to the door and I introduced Amelia and explained she was a little apprehensive about a new school and students she didn't know. Her teacher was fabulous, threw her arm around Amelia and brought her into the classroom and started settling her in. I quickly left before I went back in to tell Amelia she didn't have to stay in a strange new school with strange people.

Don't worry, I consoled myself with a sausage biscuit and cinna-melts from McDonald's.

When I picked her up that afternoon, I asked how middle school was, and she said (eyes shining) "It's AWESOME!!" Crisis averted. I asked is she stopped being nervous and she said yes. Whew. We quickly did a little homework and went to get Amelia fitted for her violin:

What a busy, crazy, fun, exhausting day! Good luck to my 2nd and 5th grader! I love you two!!