Brag about your kids

Go on. I know you want to. OK. I'll start. So today is the end of the first week of school and I have been so incredibly impressed with both of my boys, I can hardly stand it. This year they both started new schools which are very different from where they had been going. Starting at the age of two, both went to a private Montessori school. We had planned on keeping them there until sixth grade and then moving them to another private school or possibly a magnet school. However, circumstances this past spring forced us to move them early and given the timing, it was too late to get them into another private school so they are in public schools (we haven't sent them to public schools before for academic reasons and the jury is still out on whether or not they are going to actually get a good education - this is Alabama, after all). I've got one fourth grader and one sixth grader (who is going to middle school now). Anyway, pretty much everything is new for them. They will be at separate schools for the first time. They have to ride the bus. They will be buying their own lunch. They are going to schools that are 6x and 10x bigger than their old school. My sixth grader has to change classes and keep up with a regular locker, a band locker and a gym locker. He has to keep up with all his own assignments and books and school supplies. (I think it's ironic that Montessori is built on a foundation of raising independent kids but based on what we've seen so far with the public schools, my boys were pretty much coddled in their private school.) They have to get up much earlier than in the past. And my older son is absolutely not a morning person. We had many fights getting ready for school over the years. We've been working on them setting their alarms and getting themselves up every morning. The first few days of this week, I would hear his alarm beeping and beeping and beeping and then he would finally turn it off. But then I didn't hear any footsteps and I would wait and then I'd go into his room and he'd gone back to sleep. But then Thursday and today, he was up and ready without any help from me. (My fourth grader is a morning person and hasn't had any problems getting up this week.) I'm starting to think my sixth grader just needed to get away from his old mom (and that's fine). Maybe he was just tired of having to have me drive him to school and have to deal with me in the mornings. It doesn't matter to me because our mornings this week have been great (only one minor incident with a mildly cranky sixth grader) and he's really happy. He's a bit quiet and isn't the type to just go up to new kids and chat them up, but he's already managed to make a few new friends. My fourth grader can make friends with a tree stump so he's super excited to be around more people. I'm just so impressed with how well they have adjusted to their completely new environments. So what good things have your kids been up to?

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