So school was out last Thursday and I feel the need to post the requisite first day of school and last day of school photos for posterity.
First day of third grade:
Last day of third grade:
Not pictured:
Me crying while singing Jim Croce’s Time In A Bottle because time is moving too fast and now I have a fourth grader who is only two years away from junior high.
(Does anyone remember when Mike Horton came back to Salem on Days of Our Lives and fell in love with Robin Jacobs and they got engaged but they broke up because of religious differences? I’m pretty sure that they did one of those heart-tugging montages of their romantic history set to Time In A Bottle and I loved it because even as a fourteen-year-old I preferred 70s soft rock to Prince. But I just spent five minutes googling it and can’t get confirmation.)
(Anyone?)
(I think they were trying to make them the next Bo and Hope because this was during a time when Bo and Hope were off the show. I think we were supposed to believe they had died but it turned out they had just been held hostage on a remote island by Stefano DiMera.)
(This would have been around 1985. Which begs two questions: Why was I so invested in a soap opera in eighth grade? and How bizarre is the human brain that I remember these kind of pointless details?)
Anyway, I believe I mentioned that there was a party at the pool after the last day of school. Gulley ended up meeting me there with her boys and we shut it down. Which makes it sound like we really partied when I’m just trying to say that we literally stayed at the pool until they shut it down and kicked us out.
And normally I would have been excited for the next morning and the first official sleep-in day of the summer, but Caroline had swim team practice at 7:45 a.m. Then we were home by 9:00 with a full day in front of us and no real plan. So we ended up going to eat lunch and then to Target with Gulley and her boys because nothing says BIG SUMMER FUN like a trip to Target.
Later that evening we were supposed to go eat Mexican food with Mimi and Bops and my sister and her family, but Caroline started crying and said she was too tired which made me fear she was coming down with a severe illness because she has been too tired approximately three times ever in her whole life.
So I made sure she was in bed early since she had her first swim meet the next morning and we had to be at the meet at the unholy hour of 7:00 a.m. which meant we’d need to all wake up at the even more unholy hour of 5:30 a.m.
We were a little bleary-eyed the next morning with the exception of P who believes 5 a.m. is a perfectly acceptable time to be awake, but eventually got the car loaded with a pop-up tent, foldable chairs, a cooler full of drinks, sunscreen, and enough snacks to feed a small country because we weren’t sure how long the meet would last since we are swim team novices and equated a morning swim meet being akin to the Joad family packing up and heading west in Grapes of Wrath.
As it turned out, Caroline’s three events were all early in the meet. We were back in the car and headed home by 9:30 and never even had the chance to break out our cooler o’ snacks and drinks, although P and I did buy breakfast tacos at the concession stand. In the concession stand regard, swimming totally trumps soccer. Especially since there is no concession stand at the soccer fields.
Caroline loved the swim meet. She did really well in all three of her events and even came in first in her heat for the backstroke. Later that day she asked me if I knew that feeling when you get butterflies right before you race and I told her I did. Then she said, “And you get that feeling in your mouth like you’re about to throw up?”
I think that makes it official that she is a more intense competitor than her mother ever was. The only time I felt like I was going to throw up at a swim meet was when I ate too much candy between events.
And if all the racing wasn’t enough, there was the novelty that we were actually supposed to write on her leg in Sharpie marker. So for the second time in three days my child was covered in permanent marker.
After we got home from the meet I started feeling bad. I think it was a combination of allergies and getting up at 5:00 in the morning and the only cure was a nap. Caroline got on the couch with me and found some show on National Geographic channel called Python Hunters before moving on to Swamp Hunters which probably explains why I dreamed I was being chased by an alligator.
By 4:30 that afternoon I was showered and in my pajamas. We picked up burgers for dinner and then she and P sat on the couch and watched another show about people who live in a swamp and train alligators or something. I can’t keep track. There’s Swamp Monsters, Swamp People, Swamp Hunters, and Swamp Brothers.
Who knew there was such a huge T.V. market for people who live, hunt, and look for snakes in a swamp?
Not the girl who still has fond memories of Dr. Michael Horton and Dr. Robin Jacobs from 1985.