Last Day.

Tomorrow is the first day of school.  Not just for my kids, but for me, too.  The past few weeks have been cluttered with coursework, meetings, inservices, field hockey practices, and exhaustion.  I've been confident and casual; I've been panicked, irritable, and sad; I've been in denial.

Tomorrow is the first first day when I will not send my girls off to school.  Todd will take care of it for me, because when Marley hops on the bus to second grade, I'll be in the middle of my English 11 class.  When he brings Rudy to the first day of her full-day preschool, I'll be wrapping up with those juniors and transitioning to my first class of freshmen.

Tomorrow, Rudy will wear this dress, the same one that Marley wore when she was four, starting another year of preschool.  Todd has already been instructed in First Day Photography, and Liz is my Bus Stop Backup Photographer.  It will be documented, and I'm not sure yet how I'll react when I see the pictures.  I might cry, or I might feel proud, or I might just feel heartache, the sort of heavy sadness and nostalgia all moms feel in some way on the first day of school.

  Marley will wear something less classic and more on trend for her debut as a second grader.  She did some of her back to school shopping with Riley and Heather at Justice while I was sitting through new teacher orientation last week, waiting in line for my school-issued laptop.  Which, by the way, I will use only for printing.  I'm sticking with my MacBook for everything else, because I have a steep enough learning curve without reorienting myself to the world of PCs.

 Marley and Rudy accompanied me to my classroom on Friday while I finished up some of the cleaning and set-up I wanted to have done before the first day.  And yesterday, Marley came with me to the new coffee shop downtown to work on thank you notes for the friends who came to her early birthday party while I filled in a planbook to try and settle my mind about, at the very least, the first four days of school.  She got her cards written, and I felt productive and capable, and then as we we packing up, Marley knocked over my (salted caramel) latte.  Boom!  And there went my tidy planbook, and there was yet another reminder that my first year back is going to be complicated and crazy.