Well, I'll just fill in with the highlights. We went on a trip up to Nebraska to visit my parents, we went on a trip to Chicago to visit my brother-in-law and sister-in-law and to celebrate our niece's second birthday, and we went on a trip to Colorado to visit the cool weather. It was a great summer.
And now, the school year has already started. Here are the kids on their first day of school. It's the second week of school now and they're still excited about it.
The husband and I are still excited about it, too. We feel this sense of freedom that we haven't had for the last 7 years - and it's not because both the kids are out of the house. It's because we've reclaimed our house to be our own!
I should explain. For the past 7 years, we've had a nanny/babysitter that came to our house every weekday to take care of the kids. She's wonderful with the kids, but, as I think I've talked about before, she's not as detail-oriented about putting things away as we might have hoped.
However, since both the kids are now in elementary school, we decided that we don't need her babysitting services on a daily basis. We're still going to have her come and babysit every other week so that the husband and I can have a "date night", but other than that, there will no longer be someone at our house every day.
And so we have this overwhelming sense of freedom suddenly. I don't have to worry that my cleaning up and organizing will go to waste. I have cleaned up a few containers in the kids' room so far, and they haven't filled up with miscellaneous stuff again. I can't describe the sense of peace that I get from thinking about getting our house back in order again. I'm taking it in baby steps, but at least those baby steps are not going to get wiped out every day again. *sigh*
