A Catholic Librarian family update :)

Hello all, and I hope that your May is starting off well! It certainly is over here, though we are quite busy, but in the best possible way. Life is full and good. :)

Mike is in a community theater production of "Dial M for Murder" this month, and so with his rehearsals in the evenings, plus my dance classes and events, plus kid activities...it's been busy! But as I've always told the kids: everybody should have a hobby that they love and are passionate about. Ideally, one should balance a single commitment-heavy hobby at a time, because otherwise family dinners go by the wayside and a person can hardly catch their breath for the crazy evenings. But all of us (especially this introverted family!) having one hobby that we love is a good, good thing.

Our big star of late has been Henry ;-) who had his moving up day at school and is in full-on high school prep mode. HOW ON EARTH DID THIS HAPPEN?! Everybody tells you that this will happen, that the years when your kids are growing up will fly by in the blink of an eye, but you do not believe them until it actually happens to you.

😭

Henry has been much more into sports this year, and we're very proud of the effort and patient dedication he has been putting into practicing and playing. In the fall, he played on the school basketball team, which is definitely his favorite sport. Once basketball season wrapped up, he expressed interest in playing volleyball (this is my most hated sport from school gym nightmares of old :0, but I have to say that the games are very fun to watch!) and has been doing that for about a month now.

Next year, he will be going to a Catholic boys high school that is within walking distance of our house, and he is SO excited about it. We are very excited for him, although not for our checkbook, eeks! :0 But I do think that the school will be a good fit for him, and that he will thrive there. Happily, most of his friends are going there as well. He has physically grown in an *exponential* fashion this school year. I will create a little collage of his first day/last day of school picture, the difference is that distinctive!

As for our little Anne, she is wrapping up second grade. She got her ears pierced this spring, and is also looking more and more big kid-like. 😭She comes up to my chest now in terms of height. 😬 Anne is the most social member of our family. She's an introvert as well, but she easily enjoys socializing with her peers in a very non-awkward fashion that the rest of us envy quite a bit. :0 Her birthday is coming up, and she will be 8. My baby! She's participated in Girl Scouts this year, and has absolutely loved it. They had a horseback riding gathering this past weekend, and their end-of-year meeting is right around the corner. She wants to participate again next year, and I think she's making great friends, and learning heartwarming and useful new things. It's a keeper! She'll be in third grade next year, and will continue on at the Catholic K-8 school she and Henry have been at for many years now.

As the school year wraps up, Mike and I are in awe of where are kids are in terms of their growth, physically and emotionally. When you have kids, you tend to think of just the little years, and don't think ahead to when they start becoming independent young men and women. Henry has definitely started that phase, and it doesn't seem like that long until Anne will approaching that same point anymore. It's emotional, for sure.

At Henry's moving up dinner, a number of parents put together a tribute to one of the school administrators, who started at our school the year that this current graduating 8th grade class was in Pre-K. Henry wasn't there until first grade, but I found the entire thing very touching. By the time it was over, there weren't too many dry eyes out in the audience. When the kids are little, it's a bit exhausting, because their physical needs are so vast, and they have zero emotional maturity, which makes for quite a loud and chaotic experience for a number of years. And it seems like those days, when you're going through them, will never end. But then they do, and you find a whole host of new things to worry about, and then suddenly WHAM! They're a budding small adult person, and you're like "what the heck happened here?!" I quite literally can't believe it. And I hope we're doing a good job, because there is a lot at stake. I may start to cry again.

😭

It's a time of a lot of transitions in our family, due to the kids growing and becoming interested in new things and experiences. We're hanging in there, but I'm weeping buckets of tears along the way.

So.many.tears.

What is going on with you this May? How do you handle big transitions with kids, or in other arenas of your life? I'd love to hear from you!