Back to School

Our 11 weeks of summer vacation went quickly. We experienced a lot, we had a lot of fun, and hopefully we made lots of good memories. Here are some pictures from the kids' first day back.

Danielle lost her tooth on Sunday and was very self conscious about her smile at first. I think she looks cute. She thinks it's cool that she can now stick french fries in her mouth without actually opening her mouth. It's the small things, I guess. Her hair looked cute in the back this morning. Guess I should have taken a picture of that, too.

Tyler is a little anxious about this coming year. They've made a big deal out of making it known that 3rd grade is immensely more difficult than anything they've done so far. When you add the extra responsibilities he's going to have with the special program he's in, I think he's feeling a little stressed out. Danielle would be perfectly content with school if she only went 2 or 3 days a week, like last year. Thankfully they won't have a full week of school for another 3 weeks since we're going to Washington DC next week and Labor Day is the following week.

Every year I make a first-day-of-school cake. This year I used Family Fun's plan to make a science flask/beaker. It's supposed to look like a flask with boiling blue liquid in the bottom and bubbles rising to the top, not a polka-dotted volcano. If you think it looks like a volcano, don't tell me. Instead of using FF's idea to use cotton candy as the smoke coming out of the top of the flask, I used a PVC pipe with a sealed cap at one end and dry ice. The cake definitely would not have been the same without the dry ice smoke! Somehow Danielle was out of focus in all my pictures of the 2 of them with the cake. The only problem with this year's cake: I'm not sure how I can top this next year!