Tomorrow

Tomorrow...

I will pour Donald Duck orange juice into plastic colored Ikea cups for my children to drink with breakfast. Because they always point it out to one another at the store and laugh when they see, but we never buy it.  As I passed it today, however, I bought it on complete impulse.  Somehow in that moment the buying of Donald Duck orange juice was directly correlated to them having a good first day of school.

I will pack a lunch with extra care.  I will drop off a blond hair little boy at his second grade classroom and then wait anxiously all day to hear how it went.  Maybe this should be old hat for us now, this school thing.  But he has his mama's heart and always feels a bit sad when it's time to change from one thing to another.  So tomorrow I will be confident and excited as we get ready and walk to school and hope that can fill in the cracks where he isn't quite sure until he can realize how wonderful second grade is going to be.

I will attend a one hour meeting in a kindergarten classroom.  I will gush over the little chairs and tables.  I will help my daughter find her locker and by the time we leave that one hour meeting, knowing that the next day she will come without me, I will be wishing I could go to kindergarten.

We will talk again how it's okay to feel nervous, but how trying new things is how we learn and grow and we will go over all the things she has done before that seemed scary in the beginning, but that she loved later on.

Tomorrow I will put on my game face.   But that is tomorrow.  

Tonight I am letting myself have a moment.  I'm allowing myself to feel the melancholy that has been in the shadows of this last weekend. To feel the the sadness that I have been keeping at bay as the start of school, especially kindergarten, has loomed closer.  Of course I am excited for both of them to go to school, to learn to grow, to become more independent.  This is that natural pattern of life, this is what supposed to happen.  It is what I want for them.  But that doesn't change the fact that the little girl sleeping in the bunk bed upstairs who wants to wear a dress and tights tomorrow (because that's what I told her I wore on my first day of kindergarten) was just a baby, my baby, learning to walk and talk, and now she going to school.  And as wonderful as this next chapter is, I have sure loved the previous ones.

So tonight I instead of doing my usual quick check before I went to bed, I lingered by each of their bedsides taking in their sweet sleeping faces.  I let the silent tears flow especially as I knelt by my little girl's bed and brushed the hair back from her forehead.  I smiled as I thought of what a big girl she is becoming and I was overwhelmed with the amazing blessing it is to be these children's mother and to feel such love that sometimes it makes my heart hurt.

Tomorrow is going to be a good day, but sometimes I need moments like tonight too.