first days

Asher started kindergarten this morning, and Silas started pre-K.  Asher the Valiant, Silas the Silly.  Classic picture of my little boys.  Together they will be gone from home (and across the hall from each other) every morning for the first time in their lives.  On the same day that I enter the beginning of the third trimester, the last leg of my last pregnancy.

Life is changing around here, friends.

I am a little sad to see them go to "big school" (which is still just a half-day program) but I am very confident that they are where they need to be.  I've never seen a little boy more ready for kindergarten than Asher, and his teacher seems to be a perfect personality fit for him.  Silas, too, thrives in this world, and I think the five day program will be a good segue into kindergarten for him next year.  They are where they need to be, and they are going to be fine.

And I am so, so glad for Emmy and Brennan.  Whereas this summer I was mostly apprehensive - chasing a toddler with an infant in tow!  again!  - I keep looking at Silas and Asher and thinking, I get to do this all over again.  More years of playgroups and playgrounds and quiet mornings with Emmy while Brennan naps.  Watching the little ones get to know one another, and learn to play together as Brennan learns to talk.  I was so completely exhausted when Silas was a baby and Asher was a toddler that I honestly thought I was in over my head, and not up for the task of raising two children under two years old.  But for every moment of despair back then, I have had just as many times in the past two years, especially, when I have watched them together and thanked God that they are so close in age.  Those little boys are best friends, and their days are composed mostly of the internal world they have created together.  They are both lost without the other, and the year of thorough exhaustion was worth every minute to give them the friendship they have now.  And now, Emmy is going to have that too.  She will have Brennan, and he will have her, and their childhoods will be inextricably intertwined because they are so close in age.  And I get to watch their friendship grow, again.

So, yes.  The big boys are off to school, and in just a few months, Emmy will have her own little brother, too.  Life is changing around here.  Thanks be to God.