Catching up: First Day of School and Choosing Not to Be Invisible

Yes, yes, school started a month ago. Normally, I wouldn't even bother to post pics of it this late in the game (aside from the fact that I know you all are dying to see more pics of my kids, right?!). But I've been reading Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's book Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History and in her introduction, she talks about her dissertation and her first book about Martha Moore Ballard, a midwife and healer in Puritan New England. In the intro to Well-Behaved Women, Ulrich writes, "Ballard made history by performing a methodical and seemingly ordinary act--writing a few words in her diary every day. . . . To all appearances, Martha Ballard was a well-behaved woman. . . . Most well-behaved women are too busy living their lives to think about recording what they do and too modest about their own achievements to think anybody else will care. Ballard was different. She was not a mover and a shaker, but neither did she choose invisibility."

That sentence made me think. Made me think about my own life. I am not a mover and a shaker. Most everything I do is "methodical" and "ordinary." But if I do not record my life of nurturing and teaching and loving (and, at times, trying to love!) my children, if I do not record the things in my life that are methodical and ordinary, then I am by default choosing invisibility. I love that so many women and stay at home mothers today are blogging about their daily doings, their daily contributions to a very grand and important endeavor in their careers as mothers. So I am trying to write in my paper journal more and to record more in my blog to print off one day as my own record.

So, pics of the kids. Mister's first day of all-day school! A first-grader! I have to admit that it was very surreal for me to take my first son to school all day and then go home with my newborn son--I felt like I was turning one over to the world outside my home and just beginning again with a new little boy within the walls of my home. The only thing that kept me from crying all the way home was plenty of acquaintences around, including J, who had the day off. Then we have Sweetie's first day of preschool. Ironically, Mister cried again this morning--a month into school--about how he wanted to stay home with me, and Sweetie cried again this morning about how she wanted to go to first grade.