school traditions…

Oh, joy! We have officially kicked off the new school year here at the Giorgio household!

I love this time of year for lots of reasons…but a big one is the annual first day of school photo. It’s such fun to take the photo each year and then look back at years past and see how big the kiddies have grown.

Here’s this year’s entry (please note: we typically take this photo on the front porch but there was a quite a thunderstorm the morning of the first day of school so we had to use the entryway)

Tom is in 1st grade this year (woohoo!) And Lucy will be starting preschool (although she doesn’t technically start until next week we let her in on the fun this week!)

I appreciate this tradition thanks to my mom. Every year she lined up me and my siblings in our cute little school uniforms. Here’s a gem from 1988. I was going into 2nd grade, my brother Joe was going into 1st and cute little Andy was starting preschool.

Joe gets the award for looking most excited!

It took a little photo digging at my mom’s house (I’ve inherited her lack of organization for family pictures unfortunately)to find this picture but it was totally worth it.

And I decided that I love these first day of school photos so much that I plan on following my children around all the way through college just so I can capture these great moments.

Here’s to a lifetime of learning!

 

inspired by others…

Tonight I ate my dinner quickly and raced on over to my local Barnes and Noble for some truly powerful writing inspiration: talks/readings by authors Anne Ylvisaker and Katherine Hannigan.

Anne went first and talked about her latest book “The Luck of the Buttons” (which I’ve blogged about before.) It is magical to listen to her story of how her story came to be…and what you might discover, or mistakenly remember, while wandering around the Iowa prairies.

Katherine spoke second and talked about her books, including the latest “True…(sort of)”, which I finished reading just last week. It is the type of book filled with characters who pull at your heart-strings and start to influence the way you talk to and think about the world around you.

Please do yourself a favor and read both “The Luck of the Buttons” and “True…(sort of)” in the very near future! (I’ve got both now if you’d like to borrow them )

Hearing these gifted writers speak tonight was as inspiring as I hoped it would be. When you sit and listen, their natural storytelling powers make it seem that every word they offer should be written down…that it could all go into a book. And I sit, listen and smile…take it all in…dream about the stories floating around in my head…and secretly hope that some of their magic might rub off on me.

And then I add more books signed by authors to my collection.