Day 2

This morning I walked Will to his second day of second grade.  I have been building up to this task for almost a year now, since we live so close, but today was the first day when the four small bodies obstructing this path and the eating reluctance that runs the clock out on it were all finally cleared.

We walked, we chatted, Charlie sat perfectly content (or perhaps overwhelmed into silence by the shock of leaving his property for the first time since returning to Texas), the cars whizzed by and we entered the school through the back by the track, the place we went for his Tiger Cub picnic a few weeks after Charlie was born.

I worry so little about Will these days.  Everything comes so easily to him, or maybe he so easily to it.  He's confident and happy, easy to please.  When I picked him up after violin practice yesterday, it had basically fallen off my radar that it had been his first day.  "Second grade is going to be fun!" he announced to me with a grin as we sweated our way to the parking lot, preempting a question I had forgotten to even ask.  I also tend to experience fewer feelings of nostalgia over his growing up than I do with the other kids--the side-effect of having an older brother to broach new vistas of childhood first and younger siblings whose transformations are more pronounced.

But today as he scampered confidently off in the direction of his new classroom, not a hesitation about where or how or with whom he would go, I was struck by the small shock of his growing independence.  He disappeared in the swarm of kids and a day that will be all his own.

I spent the rest of the day taking excessive footage of the four kids who spent the day at home.