Flashback Tuesday

I hope you don't mind if I get a little lost in Cache Valley memories for the rest of this week.  Even though I'm so glad to be home, I'm having a hard time getting back into life here in Dallas after having such a great week in Utah.  

While the Scout Master and I were driving around on Thanksgiving morning, we stopped at Utah State University.  It's such a gorgeous campus that I found myself hoping that at least one of my kids would want to go to college there.  

When my kids were little and first starting school, we enrolled them at Edith Bowen Laboratory School at USU because we had heard such great things about it.  It was a bit of a sacrifice to drive them so far away each day, especially when June was only in half day Kindergarten, but it was so worth it.  We carpooled with a couple of other families and the Scout Master worked in North Logan, so that lightened the load a bit.  

This was the walkway from the carpool parking lot to the school.  Once, I made about 48 cupcakes with cute little skeletons on them for two of the girls' class Halloween parties.  At the time, Mack was little and still required a stroller, and because I didn't have any help, I tried to push his stroller while balancing two full sheet pans loaded with cupcakes on the top of it.  There's a slight incline down that sidewalk and a tiny little lift where two of the concrete sections don't quite meet.  The stroller hit that bump and both pans went flying.  I couldn't even hope to save any of the cupcakes because they landed face down on the sidewalk.  That happened early in our Edith Bowen experience, and I could never quite look at that sidewalk the same way again.  Nor did I attempt to be supermom after that. 

There was a tangible energy about that school that was unmistakable when you walked through the doors.  Every time I volunteered in those classrooms, I considered reactivating my teaching certificate and going back to work. The teachers were adventurous and passionate about teaching.  They all had Master's degrees or PhD's in education and they genuinely loved the kids and their jobs.   Those teachers laid the groundwork for my girls to love school and to seek after learning and I am so grateful that we all had the opportunity to experience that.

Flowering Buttercup - 5th grade graduation

Spell Girl - 4th grade

June's 1st and 2nd grade class

...and an occasional trip to Aggie Ice Cream made the distance from Mendon to USU much more bearable, too. 

I am so grateful for teachers who love what they do.  I'm grateful for memories that linger.  And I'm grateful for opportunities that are even better in hindsight than they were when we were right in the middle of them.