I think Milly was awake before either me or Amanda, but I’m not quite sure. She was certainly awake and playing with her toys in her room before I got up. Amanda went to work late today so we could both take Milly to her first day of school.
There really wasn’t all that much to it. Amanda got in the shower, I got Milly some breakfast (a mix of Honey Nut and Multigrain Cheerios) then took a shower myself. We got Milly dressed, had a slight argument over shoes, then out the door we went, Milly carrying her Disney Princess lunchbox and Jenn bag with her yellow folder in it. She’ll have a school-issued backpack later, but they aren’t in yet.
I took a few pictures and some video. Milly wanted me to ride in the back of the Jetta with her, as usual. The school is maybe half a mile from our house and we got there at around 10 after 8, about 20 minutes early. At first we walked her to her building, but we were told to take her to another one where all the kids were gathering today and Friday. We saw her teacher, Mrs. Adams, gave her a hug then she disappeared into a room, not to be seen by me or Amanda for another four hours.
I kind of wish we’d taken a little longer. We saw the Warkentiens pull into the parking lot as we were leaving, and later I saw a picture Allison had posted of Eli and Callie together for their first day of school. She said that they both found Milly right away when they went inside, but it would still have been nice to get a picture of all three of them together. I was going to try to get a picture of the three of them together when we picked Milly up, but Nick or Amy had some kind of car key issue and were going to be about ten minutes late picking Eli up. Allison was right behind us in the pickup line, but Milly was tired and uncooperative when I tried to get her and Callie together for a picture.
Amanda and I did fine. To be honest, I got a little choked up as we were walking out the door from dropping Milly off. Amanda took me back to the house then headed off to work. I got to work myself and stayed busy until I walked over to the school to be a part of picking Milly up.
I stayed pretty busy today, mostly finishing up a website I’ve spent the last few workdays on. I’ve got one or two little things left to do then it’s completely done and I’m on to the next one.
I spent a little time doing some marketing for myself today too. Every year for the past few years I’ve put out a Duke basketball schedule that can be easily loaded onto an iPhone (or other devices). Someone asked me when I was going to do it this year, and I’ve actually had it done for a week or two, but I had a plan for it. I wanted to put it behind a Like gate, which means in order to access the link someone would have to like my business’s Facebook page. It didn’t take me long, but I hadn’t had much time to sit down, do it and then let people know. I did that this morning then tweeted it to a few popular Duke blog and forum Twitter accounts that I know.
I also did a UNC calendar and put it on a popular Tar Heels message board. I did one for them last year too, just to see how much traffic it would get. Anyway, I got 20 or 30 new likes from it today. I plan on doing some for a few other schools: NC State, Kentucky and Kansas. I might do a few more, but those are all I plan on doing for sure right now.
We had small group guys over at our place tonight. A good bit of our discussion had to do with mentoring, which had me thinking a bit. We had a discussion about homosexuality after that, which seems to happen a lot. It’s a big sticking point with a lot of people these days, which I can understand.
Milly was pretty good while everyone was here. She mostly just sat in the back and watched Dora the Explorer, though she seemed to really get into it from time to time. She also dilly-dallied when getting ready, but she went down without much of a struggle.
Zach Dotsey