School is in session! Jack doesn't adjust great to change, so while he seems to like his classes and be happy to see friends every day, when he is home he is pretty...let's say volatile. This tends to be his anxiety/"things are changing" response. I am keeping the mindset that this is normal for the first few weeks of school, and if I can buckle up and tap into some extra patience for the next few weeks, hopefully we'll start to see him relax into the new routine. In the meantime, LOTS of strategizing on my end. We've got this, team.
Alice started school too. She LOVED having a creative dance class this week. Preschool is 3 days a week for her. She is adjusting well and it's been nice to have tiny pockets of time carved out to start working on the to-do list that's been piling up for months now since Alice gave up her nap at the beginning of the summer. Friday was the loveliest when Jared had his day off, and we could go on an ACTUAL date while Alice was in preschool. We went to Costco because we are really krazy.
Our backyard furniture is up and it has made all the difference! I am outside any chance I can get now. Jared figured out how to install a drip system and finished planting our front garden beds over the weekend. I'm grateful he's taken this on, because our landscape team did a pretty bad job with retaining wall shape and also uneven plant placement, and it sort of hurts my soul to look at it. If I had more time on my hands I probably would've started hissing at everyone and insisted on replanting everything myself and really gotten in there with a measuring tape. But there are too many piled-up higher-priority projects for me this year so I am letting the front landscaping go. Jared's gone full dad-mode and is really into it now anyway.
I spentt a night at a local motel on Friday to have several uninterrupted hours to tackle many of the research projects that have been neglected all summer, and to get a good night's sleep since Alice's anxiety response the first week of school has been to stop sleeping through the night and be up for the day be 5 a.m.🥱 I also needed an introvert battery recharge pretty badly after that summer. My typing thumbs are tired, so here are some pictures from our week now:
