Hello, Fall

I have to post a picture of my kids the first day of school. It’s what we parents do. I don’t want my kids to somehow find out that I didn’t put their picture up and feel less special. ALSO, I feel like we need to celebrate the fact that we made it through this summer. It was a crazy, messy summer but we all survived, pretty much intact and I think I even see smiles on their faces.

I don’t want to linger too much on summer. I am just about ready to move on. I did a REALLY terrible job of planning how I was going to balance working nights and having the kids home during the day. I reached a new low last week when I had to go sleep in the car for 15 minutes at one of Mason’s golf tournaments because I had been up for over 28 hours and thought I might throw up. Lovely. I am not graceful when I am tired. I am grumpy and have trouble functioning. 

My hope is that the kids won’t remember the times when I fell asleep reading them stories at night or at the park disguised by my sunglasses. My hope is that they will remember the horseback riding at Black Butte, the backpacking, the bike rides and some of the fun we had. I guess I will know for sure when I get their “what I did this summer” stories returned to me in a few weeks.

I have had several people ask me lately if I have had any interesting patients or unusual situations and honestly, it has been a weird summer even at work. People have seemed sicker and possibly crazier lately – or maybe it is just me. I imagine it is a combination of the two. The first 9 months of my job I only saw a patient with a feeding tube once or twice. By the end of the summer I was seeing one almost every shift. Judging from the patient population – everyone had a hard summer.

The kids seemed excited this morning – also a little nervous. Impossible to believe this is Mason’s last year of elementary school but we will cross that bridge later. In the midst of the excitement, there were some nerves too – from the kids and me. I hope they like their teachers and their teachers them. I hope they make nice friends and stay close to the solid ones they already had. I hope they don’t get bullied. I hope they don’t pick their nose in class or get lice. Some of the fears are less shallow than others.

So, despite the heat expected for this week, I say, bring on Fall. I have always loved Fall. I guess I am a geek like that. I loved school. Fall also means soccer games, cooler mornings and pumpkin spice lattes. All good things. Thanks for coming September. It’s nice to see you.