First let me say that if you have read all of my nine tips in nine days, you are an overachiever, and, also, THANK YOU!  This “little project” turned out to be an ambitious endeavor, and after a few days I thought “What have I done?  This is too much!  No one wants to read my posts every day for over a week!  And how on earth will I keep up?”  But you surprised me, and you did read some posts, and you did send me encouraging messages and new ideas, and I did accomplish my goal.  Hooray for all of us!

In the process of writing these posts, I learned a some things about myself – because you can’t really explore an idea in writing without some deep self-reflection.  I am no expert on anything, really; any advice that I give is just advice that I am giving myself, first and foremost.  I hope that reading these tips led you to some self-reflection, too.

Before we end our series, the teacher in me wants to quickly revisit where we’ve been.  Here are the first eight tips with links in case you missed one or just want to review.

Tip #1: If your first impression of the teacher is negative, keep it to yourself.
Tip #2: Work as a team with the teacher, even if she isn’t your BFF.
Tip #3: Be open and honest about what your child needs.
Tip #4: Make your child’s school experience personal.
Tip #5: Never react too quickly.
Tip #6: Create a plan to help your child open up to you.
Tip #7: Teach your kids to have an optimistic outlook.
Tip #8: Invest time in what matters most.

Which leads us to Back to School Tip of the Day #9

Preserve the memories.  And what this really means is that you have permission to force your kids to (fake) smile for first-day-of-school pictures. In fact, they need to learn that life often requires us to do things that we don’t want to do in order to make someone else happy. Like making coffee for the boss. Or cleaning the toilet for guests. Or smiling so that your mom has a picture from every first day of school of your entire life.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, kids, so say, “Cheese!”

I’m exhausted, so that is all for today, but thanks again for supporting the 2015 Back to School Edition of my blog.  I already have ideas for some additional tips in the coming weeks, but my pace will slow now that my school year has begun.  Since today is the first day of school at our house, and that is like January 1 to us, we wish all of you, whether you have kids in school or not, a HAPPY NEW YEAR!

See, I made my kids do it!  Aren’t they handsome?
I won’t mention that they had to RUN so that they didn’t miss the
bus on the first day . . .  My fault . . .  We are a work in progress, for sure! 😉