Tropical School Daze

Well, tomorrow is the big day: Bella goes back to school. My big second grader. She is excited, and while I am excited for her, the start of school always stresses me out. The getting up earlier than we have been for months, the traffic, the insanity of carpool line, I could go on but I won't, because it's nothing I have any control over so there's no point in fretting. I just need to get over it.

Are we ready? We are ready-ish. Bella still needs to put the finishing touches on her summer reading book reports, for one, but she's planning on doing that this evening. We still need to write her name on her bookbag, but that will take two minutes. Her supplies are already at school, so that's taken care of. Her first two days are half days, so I won't have to address lunches until the middle of the week. This year I have a new lunch policy - Bella will be making her own lunch, the night before school. Theoretically, this should make lunch problems moot - she will hopefully eat whatever she brings, since she made it, and it will lessen the post-school lunch criticisms. We shall see how that goes.

We have uniforms, although we don't have many uniforms, and the ones we do have need some attention - a hem there, a dried-in mustard stain there, a faded logo. The mustard stain is causing me much distress, because I have been working on it all summer and have yet to get it out. I've faded it, but you can still see it. I was actually praying about it last night, praying for assistance with a mustard stain, of all the silly things. I wished that I might have more time to get it out, although if I haven't managed it in three months I don't know what any more time could do for me. So I wake up this morning and find out...we are under a tropical storm warning! Does that fall under the "be-careful-what-you-wish-for" category? I had hoped for some more time, but not due to a tropical weather system slamming into us. I went to bed last night aware there was something churning in the Gulf, woke up to a tropical depression and came home from the grocery store to Tropical Storm Claudette.

I don't even know if school is going to be canceled - if we do get hit, it is supposed to be in the early AM hours Monday. I don't think I would like to attempt morning carpool during a tropical storm, but I will if I have to. We are on the western fringe of the projected path cone (ah, the projected path cone - how we love it or hate it, depending on where we are in relation to it), so we might just get some breezy rain. Either way, I think we are prepared. We have some bottled water and batteries (I always try to keep both around, anyway, so I had them on hand), and later I'm going to stash the things on the porch somewhere, and that's about all I can do. That and hope the power stays on, but hopefully my proximity to the naval hospital will ensure that any outages, should they occur at all, will be brief. So I'm going to go batten down the hatches, in a casual sort of way, and then it's back to business as usual. Which for me, today, will be prayerful last minute attempts at stain removal, the ironing in of hems (because I cheat because I can barely sew) and the safety pinning of waistlines.

Claudette, stay away!

**UPDATE!!** With some elbow grease and possibly some divine intervention (hey, I don't know but I'm not ruling it out, after all, I did pray for it) the mustard stain came out! My jubilation quickly turned to dismay, however, when Bella ripped a hole in the armpit of the shirt putting in on this morning. Literally months of hard work on stain removal reduced to moot. Gives me a little perspective, though, I suppose.