Sad Times...first one flying the coop

I dreaded my daughter going to kindergarten this fall. Then, on day two, after walking her and my wife out and waving goodbye to my wife as she left for work, I walked back inside, looked around, said something along the lines of "Holy shit, I can go back to sleep" and didn't get out of bed until 11. Adjustments!

The good news is the kid comes back from school at 3 REVVED UP and we end up playing pretty hard for a couple hours, so we make up for lost time.

 

Ha!

Unfortunately, mine doesn't get off the bus until about 4:15. By then, it's time to get him into the house and settled, start cooking dinner, then bath time, a little down time to relax and calm down, and then he's in bed by 7:30. If we get 20 minutes in the yard, we're lucky. The upshot is that we get a little extra time the morning (the bus comes about 40 minutes later than I used to leave to drop him off at preschool), so a couple of times we've played some frisbee or catch in the yard while waiting for the bus.

 

My younger boy also started kindergarten this fall and has taken to it extremely well, which was a surprise. I didn't get emotional when he started mostly because I was so worried that he would be able to handle it. (He is...clingy.)

His big brother is much more like me in the sense that he gets nostalgic for things almost as they're happening. He's keenly aware of his parents' emotions and gets wrapped up in making us happy, to the point where I wonder if I need to give him more space.

To the point of the original post, fortunately/unfortunately, we'll be starting the empty-nest clock over early next year. So my emotions are even more all over the place than usual.

 

My least favorite part of going to school is the early hours and how quickly we have to downshift into bedtime prep. My daughter went to afternoon pre-K last year so she was up til 9 PM most nights. It was pretty great, especially on those mornings when I worked late the night before. She's taken well to a bedtime in the 7:30-8 half-hour, but still, it's weird to already have bedtime on the horizon by 6.

 

Yeah, especially in the summer when the sun doesn't go down for another three hours. Fortunately, my kids have always been on a schedule to go to bed between 7-8 p.m., so that wasn't an issue when he began school. On the occasional nights that we let him stay up late, he doesn't sleep any later and he tends to be a mess for a day or two afterward, so we try to stick pretty much to the bedtime schedule at all times.

 

Ticket to Ride, btw, is playable from 5-45.

 

Congratulations Big Circus!

 

Twins have been on 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. schedule since they were about 8 months old.
Sadly, they're growing out of the two-nap schedule though. They used to nap 10 a.m. to noon and 2-3 p.m.
Now its just one nap at 11:30 a.m., but it lasts a good two hours, sometimes more.

The baby turned 6 months very recently. We dropped the 9 p.m. feed, and now he sleeps through 7 p.m. to 6 a.m.

this has nothing to do with the actual topic here. I know.

 

Everything about parenting is relevant to parenting threads, Buck. Even your dope-smoking college days!