08/12/2026
Back to School looked different for us this year, and for a moment I felt so much mom guilt, but then I remembered this quote I love, that says “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”” That’s Hunter S. Thompson and I don’t think he had back to school in mind, but this is definitely how we showed up at the first day of school this year, after the best weekend of our lives to close out a summer we lived HARD. We rolled in at 3am the night before (or the morning of?) after spending every last second we could sitting in the Seattle sun hugging and kissing our family, an insane 2 hr rental car shuttle situation, a missed flight, a very delayed flight we rebooked on, and a long trek to our parked car in San Diego and drive home. I dragged them out of bed a few hours later, wearing the same sweats they wore in the airport the night before (which I somehow managed to wash in those few hours cause, ew). Oh, and after a tooth was lost in the airport and not even properly placed under the pillow, the tooth-fairy still found us, which I’m personally pretty amazed by. They didn’t have new backpacks, shoes, or even school clothes unless you count the oversized $14 clearance SEATTLE sweatshirt Romy had to have at the airport, and I definitely didn’t get a photo before we trudged up the schools stairs a few minutes after the bell. But these are the photos I got of the 24 hours surrounding “back to school”, and they mean more than any front porch photo with a chalk sign I could have taken.
We are tired, and it’s not perfect and definitely not the way I imagined it all, but we are ALIVE and experiencing life together in the most beautiful way.
Now, please excuse me while I try to fill you in on our summer over the next week or so…and I can’t even wrap my head around this past weekend but I hope you’ll hear about that soon, too…