Busy But Grateful

A quick and late slice...

Yesterday I went out to my school playground to find this:

I was overwhelmed and speechless. One of my good friends at school, Kris Shrontz, a fellow slicer, and her husband designed and built this incredible chalk house. You can imagine how excited I was if you know anything about me and chalk. Let's just say when I took my two kids out there this morning to get this picture I was beyond happy.

Nine

Tomorrow he will be nine. Not a baby anymore. He is my oldest in fact but I can't help thinking about him as a baby today. All those milestones. All his silliness. All the little quirks that make him unique. He still makes little funny faces just like he did as a baby with his face scrunched up or an "ew" expression just whenever he feels like it.
Tomorrow he will be nine. He is halfway to 18. A cycle of nine years will repeat again but be a totally different cycle. He will have more science projects under his belt. He will have finished the Secret of Droons series he is currently reading. He will have a larger stack of notebooks and drawings. He will have lost all his baby teeth and stop believing in the tooth fairy.
Tomorrow he will be nine. But in 18 years he will be 27, completely on his own. Maybe even have a family. I might get to hold another baby who scrunches his face and acts silly. But for now I will cuddle my nine year old and hold onto this moment as long as I can.

Old Notebooks

I don't think it is news, but I love notebooks. I have several. Some have been well loved and some are just not my favorite so they don't get used as often. I'm not really sure what makes a notebook worthy of my love but I think it has something to do with what ends up inside. Not so much what it looks like. Some of my most beautiful notebooks are only half full. So, a few weeks ago one of my notebooks only had ten pages left. I knew the end was near.

I have been holding off on filling them. It's like I am stalling the inevitable. Now today, my favorite teacher notebook for school has only ten pages left. I sort of let out a gasp. "Not you too!" 

These are my two favorite notebooks. One for school and one for everything else. I've been dappling in some of my other notebooks but they just feel wrong.