Back to School for Some, Back to Schedule for Us

It's late August, which means back to school for most people. We're not there yet, but August does mark a major time of change at our house. Summer this year was so jam-packed with plans, parties, travel, work, and house stuff that we hardly got a chance to function as a family. You know, make lunches, sit down for dinner, or even hold any sort of regular schedule. None of that existed for us this summer.

Fall tends to be a turning point for us. Our social obligations lighten, travel is less, and the lack of yard work opens more time in our regular life. We also enter my crazy season at work for the Gala and Matt's workload increases with annual media buys coming in, which means that we have to plan for everything. We make lunches, try to do weekly meal planning, use our crock pot multiple times a week, do laundry on the weekends, grocery shop on Sundays... We just kind of get into a groove, which somehow makes us feel more like a family.

Regardless of whether we're going back to school or getting slammed at work, fall will always be our favorite time of year. There's something about it that makes me want to organize the house, make some good meals, and be a really good mom. Maybe I've been trained to feel like fall is a new phase since my mom always made a huge deal of our going back to school preparations. We took our lists to the store, begged for pens and accessories in our favorite colors, new outfits, shoes and soccer cleats... Fall meant the beginning of something. It still does. I get energized by the Fall, everything feels more crisp to me. It just feels good.

We're a couple years away from the first day of kindergarten, but it'll be here before we know it. I just hope that we find a happy medium with work and home so we can be there for our little guy on all his first days, hear about the details of his day, watch his first soccer practices, and ensure it's a special time for him, like it was for me.

This month Yahoo! Motherboard members reflect on the Back to School season. While I can't give you back to school tips, you can get some from Yahoo! here.