FINALLY!!!!

Oh my gosh, people! It is finally Summer. Yesterday at 12:10pm school let out. I swear we were the last district to get out for the summer and it feels like some people's summer is already half over! We do have the luxury of a good old fashioned summer break - we won't see the inside of a classroom until the Tuesday after Labor Day, which is a rarity now.

WHOOSH

That would be the collective sigh of relief that both Tyler and I are giving right now. It has been a really rough year for all of us, one that has resulted in us deciding to have him repeat first grade again next year. Let me tell you, that is no easy decision to make.

Our son is already on the older end of the calendar with his January birthday and keeping him back meant that he'd be a 13 year old 6th grader and 19 year old high school graduate. At first we really struggled with what that might mean for him socially until we were chatting with friends and it turns out that two of our close friends were 19 when they graduated high school and we never even knew it! So much for that "social stigma".

The biggest thing that contributed to deciding to keep him back was that because of his lack of confidence in school he never wanted to study or do his homework. Simple (even on first grade terms) assignments would become epic battles that no one could win. Our sweet, cheerful, happy go lucky boy would cry and whine and moan about going to school, when previously he liked school.

Thankfully he had the sweetest teacher in the first grade whom he adored even though school was hard for him. She encouraged him and made him feel special even when he was struggling. Love her for that. Especially since I pretty much wanted to lose my mind whenever there was more than two pages of homework (which was often).

We are taking this summer to improve on handwriting, spelling, sight words and simple math problems so that next year he will hit the ground running. We are all really excited that Tyler will have the chance to be the top student in class next year.

But for now we are just going to take a deeeeeep breath and be super excited that SUMMER IS HERE!