Back To School!!!!

This morning, our kids went back to school. I woke up early, helped make lunches, fixed hair, rolled on oils, and took pictures of every last Owens kid. Oldest two took the bus, then we drove elementary kiddos. Michael and I split the schools. He took the 1st grader. I took the 3rd and 4th graders. Then, we came home and have mostly had an uneventful day! He worked. I worked. I played with the kids. I folded a little laundry. I made lunch. 2 year old refused a nap. So,  she's now sitting on my lap as I write this and we watch the clock until it's time to go wait for the big kids' bus.

For lunch, I made chicken strips for myself and the two kiddos. I made the GF kind that I really like and that my body hasn't rejected since I started a cleanse a couple weeks ago. Funny thing, no one asked if there were more. I didn't make the entire bag. I also didn't go to make myself a plate, only to find that some pre-teen or teen ate an entire cookie sheet of them.

Don't get me wrong. I'm SO excited to hear all the first day stories and squeeze those babies so tight and tell them I missed them and wait for the oldest two to get home in about half an hour... BUUUUUUT, we all really love/need school routine. Summer kicked our butts and we were beyond ready for this!! I haven't worked during daylight hours is WEEKS! Which means, I either get all the work done for my FULL TIME BUSINESS in 2 hours at night OR I stay up to all hours of the morning and am a terrible person the next day! Haha! Also, in a family of 9, living in a 3 bedroom house, "alone time" is rare. School fills that space juuust enough that we all like each other a lot more than we did at the end of summer (that was yesterday). 

So, for all you missing your babies today on the first day, wondering how I... a former homeschool mom who never left her kids EVER for years... can suddenly be so ready to send her babies to school for 9 hours a day and not look back?! I would like you to imagine this scenario...

Your 2-3 children have MULTIPLIED. It's gone from zero to chaos in under 60 seconds. Your craziest, most out of control parenting day looks really good in comparison to this level of madness.
You have forced them to live and sleep in the same room as 2-3 other kids who they likely are not getting along with currently. Then, they ate all the food in your house. Then, they peed all over your bathroom and never flushed their poop. The bathroom flooded multiple times between the end of May and the beginning of August when your toddler shoved toilet paper down either the sink or the toilet and then filled it with water. It was so loud in your house though, that you didn't hear it until it was pouring down your stairs like a waterfall. After that seemingly crazy nonsense, when they were finished with their snacks, despite your teaching them how to throw trash away and them never doing this during the school year, they suddenly decide that the floor and couch cushions are their new trash cans. They also carry around the Costco-sized bags of popcorn and tortilla chips instead of putting it into a baggie or bowl (like you said). So there are crumbs constantly. Remember, there are too many of these children to count at this point and to be honest, they may have mutated since you saw them last. Then, they argued over who started it and lied to your face when you confronted the original starter, who you knew did it the entire time. Then, they hugged you, apologized, and you had a glimpse of magic... until they threw a rock, which randomly ricocheted, and broke your window. After this, they did their summer chores for the first time without asking, two days before summer was over. It only took 2.5 months. You took them on field trips and made YouTube videos that looked like your life is perfect and sparkly, but you are really just good at angles and cropping and cutting and pasting. Then one kid wrote their name on your garage while the other one led your 100lb dog into his bedroom. That dog may have had fleas. You spent the first 2 months of your summer treating your home with every natural, holistic remedy, followed by bombs and chemicals and literally ripping the carpet out, to get rid of these apparent "super-fleas", so you're obviously really excited about what you might find in 2 weeks. There are holes in your walls from who knows what- potentially just sheer magnitude of bodies. There are pool toys in your backyard. There are mountains of laundry in your laundry room. There are diffusers running in every room because DEAR LORD you need all the help you can get. 

Well, my friends. Do you see it? Lol. Does it give you heart palpitations? Do you need to go sniff some oils just thinking about it?? Me too. This is just a brief glimpse into our summer. Ha!

Therefore, I will buy all the school supplies and send all the first day of school gifts for the beautiful, wonderful teachers who are devoting their time and energy into my 5 school-aged kiddos. I will bring them coffee. I will plan their classroom parties. I will thank them repeatedly. I will only roll my eyes once a day when they talk about how quiet and sweet my children are, knowing that every child is exponentially better behaved at school than at home with their siblings who they argue with over the last, single half of a veggie straw. 

Today is not a sad day. Today is the day that we finally go back to normal and pretend that this past summer was an episode of Punked. Ashton is looking at me saying, "You've been punked! We just wanted to see if you could handle unimaginable chaos."

And I did. I binge-watched Netflix with my oldest two after babies went to bed, while I caught up on the bare minimum of doTERRA stuff and they folded laundry. I sometimes went to the gym really, REALLY late at night because I could not possibly sleep with so much stress weighing down on me. Somedays, I drank coffee all morning and wine at night and ate Bark Thins like it was my job... but I survived. (And remember, I also started a 30 day cleanse a couple weeks ago.)

Now, it's time for us to have forced structure so we can thrive. 

Peace out!
​I think I hear the bus and I cannot wait to hear how the first day went!!!