welcome back, school year! we missed you.

Oh man, my kids love school. Stuart has been counting down the days till Kindergarten since the day Whitney started school a year ago. He hit the ground running and hasn't looked back. A week or two in, he brought home a folder of his school work and excitedly sat me down at the table to show me. As he cracked the folder open ceremoniously, he hesitated and looked very seriously at me and said, "Now, this is quality work, mom." Got it. I'm ready.

Whitney loves 1st grade even more than Kindergarten, if that's possible. Almost every day, she comes home from school with some anecdote about her hilarious teacher that's so funny she can barely speak. Whitney has fully embraced her female identity these days. Everyday she dresses in some variation of pink and purple frilly skirts and bedazzled shirts with flowers or kitties or ponies. She spends all of her creative time drawing unicorns. I love that she spent her first few years into dinosaurs and Spiderman, but I also love this new age of rock 'n roll princess.

Spencer wasted no time taking over as king of the castle. The first day of school, he immediately took over Whitney's computer chair throne, then climbed onto the couch in the late morning and announced that he would like a movie with popcorn and cookies and chocolate milk. How do you say no to that? We're four weeks in and he still insists that we pack him a lunch in his lunch box everyday with the big kids', and then zip it into his back pack which he takes EVERYWHERE: the grocery store, the jogging stroller, the park, the library, etc.