First day of school 2022-2023

We started school last week--the first and only year that all six of our children will be attending K-12! (And also the reason that I am finally catching up on blog posts!) 

Kindergarten for Matthew

Fourth grade for Nathan 

Sixth grade for Luke (first year of middle school)

Eighth grade for Isaac (last year of middle school)

Tenth grade (sophomore) for Juliet

And twelfth grade (senior!!) for Abigail!

 

End of the school year milestones

Oh man, so much happening at the end of the school year! I'm not even going to try to keep it in in order. Above: Luke, Abigail, and Isaac all competed in the state piano competition AND they all made it to the finals, woohoo! (Note: we did not actually *compete* in the finals because it was scheduled when we were out of town. Bummer, but it was amazing that they made it so far!)

Abigail competed on the school robotics team, which was a TON of time (she didn't get home until 7 pm every day during build season), made lots of new friends, and had a great experience! We loved watching her compete (especially Matthew, who was VERY into waving flags, yelling chants, and sporting badges). 

Abigail also went through a pretty rigorous interview process for her summer job, working full-time as a camp counselor for the local parks department! 

Luke had his fifth-grade promotion ceremony and was on the 6th grade!

These guys are the best of buddies. 

And Matty finished up three years of preschool!

He has been with the same teacher for all three years (she came back from maternity leave for the last day!) and Nathan had her before that and man I don't know what we are going to do without her this year!!

These three boys had an awesome spring soccer season! (And I may or may not have been hugely relieved when Juliet and Isaac decided not to run track in the spring...)

And we started hosting post-pandemic birthday parties again!!

And ran our first post-pandemic half-marathon!



And got to chaperone our first post-pandemic field trip! (This is our cute little neighbor who is in Nathan's grade and Matty was soooo happy to see him!)


And suddenly it was the last day of school...

And on to summer!

 

2021-2022 school year begins!!

It's hard to believe we are entering our THIRD Covid-affected school year, yet here we are!!! After a long and hard fight to get the mask mandate, I'm really hopeful that we stay in school this year with a normal schedule (last year we were hybrid for grades 6-12). How is Abigail a junior & Jules a freshman? Already?! Seems like this was just yesterday.

Matthew will turn 5 in late September, so we opted for one final year of preschool with his beloved teachers. 



Luke's last year of elementary school!!

Isaac at the middle school all by himself until Luke joins him next year...

We had back-to-school orientations beginning August 2 and ending August 10. IT FELT LIKE SO MUCH. I shared Luke's feelings.

(No pictures of Abigail because she drove herself so she could meet up with friends; she took Juliet with her which I thought was so sweet, so by the time the first day rolled around Juliet felt pretty confident in navigating that gigantic school!!)

And then it was time for the back-to-school dinner...

Totally nailed the roast beef (which is always a roll of the dice; so much harder for me to get right than pot roast!).

Big shout-out to Luke who is ALWAYS such a fantastic kitchen helper (we made these rolls twice in the last couple of weeks and he's getting so good at them!!)

And my "don't forget anything" white board; I texted this photo to my friends saying "what am I forgetting?!" and then they thought of like 3 more things. It takes a village!!!! 

And to take us out, one totally unrelated photo of Luke eating dinner a couple nights ago (Thai-style fried fish sandwiches that were so good but pretty darn time-consuming to make) and I just loved his impish little expression, hah!