First day fun

So here are the long-awaited first day of school pics, only a week after the fact. I am still so excited for the boys and can't wait to hear everything they did every day, even though it is already like pulling teeth. "How was your day?" I ask. "Good," they say. "Well, what did you learn today?" I ask. "I don't know, and can you please stop asking?" They already have the whole teenager thing down.
The first day went smoothly, Aaron and I both drove them to school since the bus doesn't go to our house, we waited with them in the gym as everyone got organized and checked off the list, then we marches as a group down the the classroom. They looked small and a little tired and lost as they got settled in, but as soon as the teacher sat them down "cris-cross-apple-sauce-hands-are-in-our-laps" and started reading "The Kissing Hand"
by Audrey Penn, they were just fine. I thought I would cry at some point, but I was so proud and excited for them that none of us even shed a tear! I can't believe how big they are getting. In fact, they seemed to have gotten older by the time we picked them up from their first day of school. We went to the Kalamazoo Nature Center on Sunday, and they have some birds on display; a kestrel and some owls, among others, and Connor asked me to get out a piece of paper and write notes about his observations about the birds; i.e, "The American Kestrel has a sharp beak for stabbing into the meat that it eats." I don't have the paper in front of me, but that was the gist. I love it that he gets it that writing things down can help you remember, and that he found the things that he learned that interesting.
Here are some pictures from our first day of school. Click on the slideshow to see them bigger...