The final countdown!

So as of tomorrow, 4 out of the 5 kids will be in school. :)

I won't get to see the older 3 off on their first day - they'll be with their father. But, they'll be here afterwards, so it's all good.

I took Alex and Daniel to their open houses tonight, so they got to see their rooms and see what sort of fun is waiting for them. Alex goes tomorrow for half a day - he goes half days for 4 weeks before he transitions to full-day kindergarten. Daniel starts half-day preschool on Monday.

I sat down with my calendar today to try to make some semblance of order out of how to get the kids back and forth to school. It appears that Daniel will not get to ride the bus to preschool like Alex did last year, so that's adding to the confusion.

For the first 4 weeks, I have to take Alex to school at noon and pick him back up at 3pm. After that, it'll be 8am and 3pm. So that's 10 trips per week.

Once Daniel starts preschool, I have to drop him off at 12:30 and pick him up at 3:30. Another 10 trips per week.

Now that I know that Daniel is going to preschool in the afternoon, I was able to get him back into the other preschool that he went to 2 mornings per week last year. So that'll be dropoffs at 9am and pickups at 11am on Wednesdays and Fridays. 4 more trips per week.

Then I'll also have to get the older 3 kids to their school (in another town) on Thursday and Friday mornings by 7:30am. 2 more trips.

So that's a total of 26 trips per week, every week, to get 5 kids to 5 different schools in 2 different districts. Once Alex goes full-time, I can combine dropping the older 3 off and dropping him off, so it'll go down to 24 trips per week.

Luckily, I can do a lot of them on foot, weather permitting. But it's going to be crazy. And then of course the girls want to play basketball again, so that'll mean getting them back and forth to practices and games too.

I did manage to give the boys haircuts today, although they were not uber-cooperative with the picture-taking process. LOL However, Alex's expression here pretty much captures how I felt after attempting to decipher the transportation chaos....

But for now, I need to get Alex to bed (yes, he's still watching a movie - bad mommy) and clean up and mentally prepare myself for the whole back-to-school thing. Tomorrow, a whole new round of chaos begins.

Oh, and I did finally get my new glasses today...notice the prince sitting behind me....