School Days and Birthdays

The Sunday afternoon mass exodus from the mountains makes for brutal traffic - we really need to get our act together and get on the road in the morning.  Toss in a forest fire closing off all but one lane of Hwy 80, and you make a just over 3 hour drive into a 6 hour one.  We barely made it back in time for dinner and bed before the big FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL.

 

Brennan was very happy - he got assigned the school's superstar teacher Mr. Draven, who he's known since kindergarten, AND he's back in the same class as his buddies Enzo and Julian.  Lucie was excited but a little nervous, since she had never met her teacher before, and was worried she might be expected to know how to read.

 

For our foreseeable future with SFUSD, Back-to-School overlaps very tightly with Brennan's birthday -  which means the poor kid hasn't had a well-planned celebration since the tail end of preschool, when he turned 5.  Luckily, the big day did fall on my day off, so I at least had time to bake and frost a cake, and he doesn't seem to notice we're scrambling all this together at the last minute.

 Although he did mention it didn't seem like very many presents.  Then I reminded him this was his "family birthday" and he still had his "friend birthday" party coming up, which generated an "Oh, yeah" and an embarrassed little laugh.

There was a brief pause in the birthday festivities while I made a quick trip to Northern Michigan, for my grandmother's memorial.  Wasn't Doris the coolest?

I haven't been Up North in 16 years.  While some things have changed - there's a little bookstore with a coffee bar, the liquor store now has an annex wine shop, complete with weekly tastings, your shoes no longer stick to the floor at The Landings - some things, hopefully, never will:

Like Hemingway watching over his preferred bar stool at the City Park Grill in Petoskey

- and sunset swimming in Lake Charlevoix.

If you had asked 20 year old me if I would ever voluntarily travel across the country to go to Boyne City, MI, I would have told you were crazy.  Now it seems crazy that I was away for so long, and that it's unlikely I'll have a chance to return any time soon.  We had a big family dinner at my aunt & uncle's house, caught up and reminisced, and the next morning scattered her ashes on the lake she loved.  And then it was time to get back on a plane, so I could make it back for more birthday celebrating.

First, a small party at the Coppola Pool:

Then, the big Minecraft party at Tech Rocks!

For those of you playing along at home, this is what a Minecraft Party looks like:  18 third graders, madly mashing on keyboards, while a few alleged adults lead them on a networked adventure somewhere in Minecraft land.  Followed by cupcakes.  And yes, there was a pile of presents, so no need to worry about the alleged deficit in the photo from his actual birthday.

This was a No Little Sisters Allowed event, so we arranged for Lucie to go play her buddy Aya.  I was expecting a simple afternoon of playing with toys and tormenting big sister Bo.  Instead Lucie went out on the town with Aya's family - including an uncle visiting from Dublin - and saw Ghostbusters, shopped at H&M, went out to dinner, and arrived home in an Uber (not alone) at 9 pm.

Here's Lucie, partying like an Irish rockstar (courtesy of Aya's mom):