I set an alarm this morning. One of my biggest fears is over sleeping and being late, so I generally always end up waking myself up way before my alarm is even set to go off, but regardless, I set the alarm so we could get up and get Ana to her first day of school on time. Turns out today, it was Ana whose internal clock woke her up before the alarm. She came into our room about 15 minutes before we were suppose to get out of bed, so Sim invited her under the covers to cuddle while we waited for the alarm to go off. When it finally did, Ana sat up in bed and shouted, “It’s time to go to school!” Then I had to explain we still had two hours until school started and no one would be there yet.

Our morning progressed, as most mornings do when we need to be somewhere first thing, but unlike those other mornings today we were able to do everything at super speed so we ended up all ready to go a good half hour before we needed to be at school. So I took the opportunity to exhaust Ana with the obligatory “first day of school” pictures and she was happy to oblige if it meant we were progressing to actually leaving for school. I mean she was wearing her coat and backpack, what else would we be doing, right?

After I took the pictures, we loaded up in the car as I anticipated more traffic than usual since everyone else with children would also be taking their kiddos to school and we have to drive through several school zones just to leave our neighborhood. But I didn’t take into account that the majority of the schools started a good hour before Ana’s preschool, so once again we found ourselves ahead of schedule and with some time to kill. Thankfully, I looked around the parking lot and there were several other families sitting in their cars waiting for it to be an acceptable time to arrive at school. As it was, Ana and I were still the first ones into the classroom, but it gave her a few minutes to chat with her teacher and learn the whole “what to do when you get to school” drill. Minutes after Ana placed her coat and backpack on a hook, washed her hands, and set to explore the classroom chaos broke out as everyone else arrived in a frenzied swarm. As always, being early pays off!

As we were leaving school, I grabbed my camera again and took a few pictures on the grounds (I didn’t want to embarrass her by taking pictures IN the classroom…though I should have, as most of the other parents did). Ana was very happy about her first day of school and we went to Starbucks for a little post-preschool snack to celebrate.

You can see all the pictures I took of Ana’s first day of school here plus the ones I took on my iPhone are up on Flickr.