Before School

Each morning before 1st grade, the routine has been fairly simple:  get up, get dressed, brush your teeth and so on.  Go downstairs, eat breakfast, and then it's just about time to get going to school.  But before school, we have to do two things before piling into the car:  prayers and the photo on the porch.  Each morning, we'd tromp outside (with one exception), and snap a photograph of Madison in front of the house.

Today was that last photograph.  It was the last day of first grade.  Just after snapping the photo (and prayers, and taking Madison to school), we put together the above slide-show.  "The End" seems to be a theme of the day, but more on that in a bit.  The slide show above was meant to sort of show her growth, and you can kind of see that over the year.  But more than that, you can see her character each day - she posed herself each morning, not content to just stand there and smile.

It was a bittersweet day for her.  Again, there were tears.  I think it was one of those things that was sort of communicable:  like a virus spreading.  One would get sad about missing friends and teachers, and then the next would.  And then another.  And then there were some tears.  And then there were more tears.  Let's just say that Madison cried a bit today, but wasn't alone.  The bus driver said it was a rough drive!

Daddy was overjoyed to see summer - it's such a contrast, isn't it?  Some kids just love school.  Madison is one:  she enjoys going to learn and see friends.  Her grades were fantastic, by the way.  She got very good scores on her report card - we have such grace over our lives right now.  All is well.  Thanks be to God!

We're keeping up the education throughout the summer, of course.  As recorded here, we have her in various summer camps of course.  And there are programs we've signed her up for with the library too. But there are also homework assignments, and continued speech therapy programs (there's one we just downloaded on the Kindle).  And yes, there's piano practice that continues - and don't forget that we hope to have her swimming by summer's end.  So there's plenty to do!

We used the "Monk" theme song on that video above, mainly because today's the day we finally reached the last episodes of that show - Mommy and Daddy have been binge-watching that show ever since September, when we saw an episode at Nana and Ba-Ba's house in Florida.  "Binge-watching" is a fairly new phenomena:  it used to be that in order to see an entire series on television, you actually had to be at a certain place and a certain time each week throughout a season.  If you missed an episode, you possibly could catch it on reruns.  But in today's world, you can watch not just an entire season, but an entire run of a television series.  This show ran for eight years, and we watched all eight years of shows, somewhat of a routine for us, throughout the year.  It's sort of depressing when you get to the end though - whatever will we watch next?  That's the sore point of binge watching, at least if the show is no longer broadcasting new episodes.

That's just Mom and Dad though.  Madison isn't old enough to watch that.  We did watch "Inspector Gadget" with her though!  Daddy is going to be giving out those happy meal pieces of Inspector Gadget soon enough, one by one as Madison completes her piano practice.  She enjoyed the movie - we always thought it was fun.  Especially the "Minions Anonymous" bit, and the evil Inspector Gadget too.

We're still working hard towards Summer Xtreme.  Tomorrow will be busy though - we've got a wedding to attend to.  The neat thing about that is it is Madison's first wedding.  She's invited as well, so we'll be sure to dress her up and take lots of pictures!

As for today, it was an end of things again in another big way:  one of our cast members at KidPak is moving to Ashville.  We'll no doubt take pictures of Madison with her this weekend, but Karen will be greatly missed, an extremely talented lady.

It was a full day today for everyone, but there's nothing wrong with that.  And on the plus side:  we don't have to set the alarm for tomorrow morning!  That's one "ending" we're not upset about in the least!