First Day of Kindergarten

Well...I guess this happens to all parents of 5 year olds...today is Makena's first day of Kindergarten! She's been excited about if for...oh...about a year now. We went through the ritual yesterday of deciding which outfit to wear. That only took an hour. This morning we got up as planned, got ready, had a last minute change of heart about which outfit to wear, then drove to school!

Calling it the "first" day of school is a bit of a misnomer, though. Our school staggers the rising kindgergarteners over four days (so each kindergartener only goes for one full day on either yesterday, today, tomorrow or Monday). They don't determine the classes until after those four days so on Tuesday, we go for an hour and a half to meet her actual teacher, THEN next Wednesday she goes for a full day to her real classroom. It's kind of like having three "first" days. A little anticlimactic, but it certainly works when you can't decide between three outfits for what to wear on your "first" day.

Of course, the next week she's off Monday for Labor Day then she's off again Thursday and Friday for teacher workdays. So sometime in November we'll be into a real 5-day-a-week schedule.

As an aside...in some odd twist of...something...on the first day of school I found myself putting on khaki shorts and a white shirt and I woke up with a big zit smack in the middle of my forehead. Clearly some things never change.

24 Hours of Booty

Say what?? 24 hours of who?? No worries...it's kosher. For the second year in a row, Brett participated in a charity bike ride here in Charlotte around what is locally known as the "Booty Loop". The race got its name from the see-and-be-seen 3 mile bike/run route around one of the hipper neighborhoods here. 10 years ago, someone decided to organize a 24-hour team ride to raise money for cancer research and awareness. 10 years later, it's a Charlotte institution, rasied over $1MM this year and has expanded to other cities. Not too shabby!

This year, the team (which is mainly comprised of people from our church) rode in honor of our friend Sydney, who is my age, the mother of three and has been living for a year and a half with a brain tumor; Amy, also my age, mother of an infant, recently diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer; and Jonathan, another church member recently diagnosed with cancer. Again, this year, Brett chose to be the middle-of-the night rider and he rode from the beginning of the ride at 7pm on Friday until 6:30am Saturday (he took breaks, but he was out there in the lonely wee hours).

Here are a few pictures from the party we had at the beginning of the ride.

The whole team:

Gratuitous action shot: