Last Day of Summer

Tomorrow the kids go back to school.

I never would have expected it but I’m a little heartbroken. Maybe we’ve had such a good summer together. Or maybe because the smoke made it feel like an incredibly short summer.

But I think it boils down to the fact that I’m not ready for them to grow up. I’m just not ready for a first grader and not ready for a full day preschooler.

It’s such a double edged sword, being a mom.

I’ve longed to have my days back, where I could work on my craft or my business for hours during the day, maybe hit the gym f for a few hours and shower in peace.

But now that I’m on the precipice of the school year, I’m a little terrified.

The first few years are so formative. Are we helping them be a resilient person? A kind person? A helpful person? Or a persistent person? We don’t know. We don’t know until we shove them of to school for 8 hours a day and they come back a little bit different every day. We can only hope that their time at school helps mold them in the way we hoped it would.

These photographs are dedicated to the last summer of babyhood. Wild evenings celebrating summer in the backyard with his little sister. Feeling drops hit warm skin and laughing with total freedom. I feel like I really have to accept he’s not a baby anymore, not at preschool. He’s off to first grade now and there’s no looking back. So these are the wild days of that kind of innocence. The kind of innocence you have from just being tiny…