Back to School Bonanza

Keira and I started school this week, so the past few weeks have been a blur of preparation!
A few weeks ago, we hit 7 stores in one day (!!!) and basically bought Kiwi a whole new wardrobe, because she had suddenly outgrown all of her 5T clothes practically overnight.  When we got home, I asked her to do a fashion show of some of her favorite outfits, and Ellie decided to join in.  It's scary that some of these clothes almost kind of fit her, too!

Note: the styling and matching of the outfits, along with the posing, was entirely done by them.  I am not (that) insane.

A few days ago, we took her to JCPenney for a free haircut, which totally did not even begin to balance out the cost of her school clothes, but hey...fourteen extra bucks in my pocket!

The girls have been real troopers about coming to school with me 6 or 7 times this summer and entertaining themselves for a couple of hours while I got some work done.  Here's some of the fruits of my labor, so far:

I also decided that, now that we'll have homework and folders and what-not to keep track of, our laundry room needed a serious makeover, since that's where we enter and leave our house through the garage.  I never remember to take "before" pictures, but it was that ugly off-white "builder blah" color and a total mess.  Now, it's so much nicer to come in and see a pretty, semi-organized room!  The paint is a mixture of the colors from about 4 different rooms in our house, but somehow it turned out almost identical to the color in our bedroom.

So yesterday was the Big Day--Keira's first day of kindergarten!  Bear got to go with her, because parents tag along on the first day and it's only an hour or so long.  Since my partner and I tag-team it on the first day of school, each of us was able to sneak off for a little while to join our kindergarteners and hubbies (hers is in the morning class and Kiwi is in the afternoon, so that worked out nicely) and snap some pictures.

Her teacher read aloud The Kissing Hand and I was pretty proud of myself for only tearing up a tiny bit.  (If she'd read Love You Forever, I would've been a goner.)  There's Kiwi in the closest orange square.

We each got a heart sticker to place in the palm of their hands, like in the book, before another teacher led the kids off for a short diversion while the parents got the Intro to Kindergarten slideshow.

I scurried back to my own class while Bear stayed to do a few centers with Kiwi. 

I can't believe we have a kindergartener, and that I'm starting my TENTH year teaching!!