Back to School {Personal & Professional}

Piper is starting school EXACTLY one month from today.  My first kid, the one who made me a mom (or the semblance of one) – she’s going to be in kindergarten.  It’s Tax-Free weekend in Virginia, so we spent the day at Target going nuts on school supplies.  She picked out her precious little book bag (covered in stars), epic 90’s-inspired attire, and maybe I brought my camera to document it.  Back to school shopping was always my favorite thing to do when I was kid.

  There’s something about the smell of the back-to-school aisle.  I’m pretty sure it’s the paper.  Fresh notebooks, pencils, crayons, canvas book bags… seriously, I love it all.  It’s the new start to a new year and something extraordinarily special.  I felt like a crazy person in Target toting around my camera getting overly emotional about my kid walking around with her book bag, but I couldn’t help it.  She gets to start fresh.

One of the things Piper said to me while we were shopping was: “Mommy, what if I don’t make any friends? I don’t know anyone there!”  She’s been at her current school now for 2 years, and she’s got a load of friends that are staying for private kindergarten.  We’re enrolling her in Chris’ alma matter, and she really will love it.  While some may think that telling a kid to roll with the punches at 5 is too early, she has to learn to step outside of her comfort zone at some point.  She’s a creature of habit.  She comes home every day, goes to her room to decompress (yep, I promise that’s true), and has tablet time.

We do this in business, too.  It’s so easy to be comfortable working with the same people over and over again.  We get nervous to put ourselves out there.  What’s important to remember is that the more people we know, the more we interact, the more that we step a little further outside of our safe place, the more likely we are to succeed.  It’s important to start fresh – the new, clean sheet of paper, the smell of the canvas book bags.  New relationships can only better you and what you do.

Sure, I brought it back to business, but let’s be honest.  The real reason I wrote this post is to talk about how precious my kid is and to say how insane it is that she’s growing up.  You know one month from today, I’ll have some awesome pictures of her getting on the school bus for the first time.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *