Today was the first day of school for the 2013-2014 school year. I am looking forward to another great year with all the boys. I can remain hopeful, right? Dreaming is always allowed. I will enjoy the ride…
With every school year comes the requisite first day of school pictures. I know the children do not enjoy them so much, but I really do enjoy seeing how much they have grown from year to year. Believe it or not it is amazing to see how much they have grown in just a few months. Maybe I will take the time to actually put a couple of year’s pictures side by side for comparison purposes.
Kyle is starting the 8th grade this year. He is happy to be there! He has really grown a lot and while he is just my goofy, quirky and crazy kid as always he really is a great kid. He is always a ball of laughs when I need them. I hope that his teachers are ready to laugh more than they have ever laughed before because he will definitely keep them on the edges of their seats. At the very least he will probably give them more opportunities for a “face palm” than any other child they have in their classes. If he can come up with something witty, he will. It might take him a minute, but he will.
Lance is starting the 3rd grade this year. He is super excited as you can tell from this totally posed smile. Here he is posing with his brand new lunch box that was made super special just for him by yours truly. He is ready to head out the door and ride his bike the almost two miles to the school. Here is to a good year ahead that will involve reading in spite of his desire to skip it entirely.
Andrew managed to get past me first thing this morning so his first day of school picture was taken tonight. Of course it was just as dark as it would have been if I had taken it this morning. We left to head to the school at 6:00am. Tomorrow we will leave even earlier as Early Morning Seminary starts at 5:40am sharp! He is starting the 11th grade this year. It is hard to believe that he is officially a junior. How is that possible? Wasn’t he just a scrawny little baby in my lap just a few years ago? He still is scrawny but he certainly does not fit in my lap any more. He measures in at about 6’1″ at least. I am not entirely sure to be honest with you because we have not had him measured recently. I should have that done. I can tell you that he comfortably wears between a 34″ and 36″ inseam. So when you think you have it bad trying to find pants to fit your child, think about that. This year he is a full-fledged IB student and I think that he is excited about that. He will finally be in classes with only students just like him. He is taking Calculus BC as a junior. His father and I both took Calculus as seniors. The IB program is challenging him academically where the GT and AP programs would have left him bored.
Of course the first day of school did not go without bumps.
Lance’s day was fine for the most part. I think he had a great day. He is excited to go back tomorrow. I think the worst part for him is that his bicycle seat is hurting his bottom already. We are only on day one and his buttocks hurts. I have to say that mine is not feeling fantastic. Sitting on a bicycle seat for a ride down the street is one thing, but for 2 miles at a time is an entirely different thing. I did it for almost 8 miles today. He did almost 4 today. I feel his pain twice over. I get it. It also rained today so he did not get to have recess outside. That is a pretty big deal, right? We had to ride home in a little bit of drizzle. It was not too bad.
Kyle’s day was fine for the most part too. I got an email from his math teacher stating that he is potentially in the wrong math class. Evidently there are several of them that are in the wrong class. Evidently several of the students that took a particular class last year are in her class (Pre-algebra) and they should be in in the Algebra I class. I am not entirely sure what is going on and Kyle is just as confused as I am. I sent back an email stating that I was not sure what class he needed to be in but I wanted to talk to her. I do not want him to be bored in that class and if it is going to be a repeat of what he already did last year I do not want him to do that. Her email said we needed to get this fixed ASAP so that they do not fall behind. I understand that. Otherwise the worst thing that happened to him was that his bus was late returning him home from school. It was an half hour late. This is not too unusual for the first week of school as they are figuring out bus routes and different issues that come up with them, but as I was finishing up filling out the different paperwork and forms for Andrew and Lance that came home with them and I looked at the clock and realized that it was nearly 5:00pm and he still had not arrived home from school yet I did get a little concerned. The school is a quarter mile from our door to its front door, it should not take them an hour to get home on the bus.
Andrew’s first day of school was a bit on the crazy side. I could probably cut this short by saying that if it could go wrong, it did go wrong. If they could screw something up, they did screw it up. They managed to screw up just about all of the junior and senior IB students’ schedules. That is not cool on any level. He said there were 80 students in his 1st period orchestra class (Chamber Orchestra). To be honest with you, I am not sure there are 80 people in Chamber Orchestra. I am pretty sure that there is a maximum number of allowed students even on orchestra classes in the State of Texas. Moving down his schedule, however, there is no 3rd period at all listed on the schedule. None. It is just not there. It jumps from 2nd period to 4th period. He has no History class listed at all. I am sure it went missing with his 3rd period. The story he told me about how they could not just give him a history class during 3rd period was enough to make anyone’s head spin. Oh man! Then to think that they managed to do this to a good chunk of the school because it was not just the junior and senior IB students that they managed to screw up on. It makes you wonder what they were doing. There were parking issues. This was not a surprise. We managed to avoid this because we got there so early and we did not have to park. This was not a surprise as I already knew this after talking to Mrs. Wells on the phone about obtaining Andrew a parking pass when he gets his driver’s license in October. The science labs were still under renovations in a major way, to the point that the furniture and fixtures will not be delivered until late-September and then it will still need to be inventoried, processed, labeled, distributed, and installed. They had other renovations going on in the school as well that were not completed. Andrew said that it looked as if they had started these renovations last week. Brilliant! In all of this, Andrew was able to find one good thing out of it all, textbook roll-outs did go smoothly. He did manage to get his Calculus textbooks today. I am impressed that he got a decent Calculus textbook. He has two and one is just one that was required and the other one is a decent textbook. I am impressed. Of course, he has only gotten his Calculus textbooks thus far but that is all that he cared about.
All in all, I would say that it was a successful first day of school.
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