1.  I rolled into the weekend with my joy cup overflowing. You guys, the kids had such a good first week at school. I mean, I expected they would but I was still hanging in there, waiting to see if the experiment blew up. Instead I got this each afternoon.

  • Day 1 – “Wow! It was such a great day!” That’s wonderful, babes, but day one is never the hard stuff.
  • Day 2 – “I love this school.” From BOTH of them. And I’m trying to pull out of the parking lot while quietly sniffling into my sleeve because what? you love it?? – I’m not crying, YOU’RE crying.
  • Day 3 – “We had so much fun today.” In, you know…class.
  • Day 4 – “We had the coolest writing prompt today. We had to imagine a world without mirrors…” That led to an interesting discussion.
  • Day 5 – “Today went so fast! I think it’s because we started doing more academics.” Okay, we’re all in.

2.  It took me until Friday to learn the school has a rule: “No Spartan sits alone.” This is how I found out neither of my babies – who am I kidding, Bear’s a social butterfly who’s never met a stranger, I worried about T-man – sat alone at lunch. From the very first day. (I’m not crying, YOU’RE crying.)

3.  I don’t think I realized exactly how much stress I carried around with me all the time. This week has been full of strange little shifts. It’s good.

4.  The cows are still mooing away behind the trees. I keep watching to see if they freak out the dogs but so far so good.

5.  Bear had a sleepover this weekend with her new/old friend. On Monday she told me she’d really clicked with a girl at school – “it was like we’d known each other forever!” – and wouldn’t you know they were in the same playschool class a bazillion years ago. They used to hang out together at the YMCA daycare, too. Crazy, crazy, crazy.

6.  Gracie is precisely one pill away from finishing her last medicine. Maybe we can go an entire month without some crazy Gracie note on the blog…bwahahahaha!! As if.

7.  I asked Bear if she wanted to try out for the school play and my stars, the look on her face. She’s all, “Mom. It’s a musical. There’s dancing.” What, like you’re an ogre with cement block feet? Posh!

8.  Y’all, the level of wreckage in my house is off the charts. I don’t know what happened. First I meant to straighten this thing up, but I got distracted by that other thing and messed up the area more in the process. Then I tried to sort out the new mess but set down my papers from a meeting and three layers later I can’t figure out where to start. Seriously, we might just have to burn this puppy down and start over.

9.  You’ll note I’m still sitting here at my computer, happily blogging away, despite said wreckage surrounding me. I don’t know how to explain that either.

10.  And for the weekend Twitter roundup: Senator John McCain passed away and is being honored by Republicans and Democrats alike. The White House lowered flags to half mast and Donald Trump managed a tweet expressing sympathies for the family, but he couldn’t muster up words of praise for McCain himself. He then went on to repost previous tweets about the economy, Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, and the special counsel investigation. I especially loved his claim to an “over 90% approval rating for your all time favorite (I hope) President within the Republican Party.”