"School Days"

Many of you already know about Shell's "Things I Can't Say" blog. She writes about her family, her kids, certain...uhhn, "types" of moms, a wide variety of other topics of her choice. She does giveaways and contests and participates in a bunch of different memes. She is funny, informative, caring. She is what I consider sort of the penultimate blogger!

Her button is here to take you right to her page if you've never been there. You should go, she's one of the best.

Anyway, the reason I am promoting her site today is that my post, which will follow in a minute, was directly "inspired" by Shell's post today. She does product evaluations from time to time and today, in preparation for "Back to School", she was doing one about backpacks for kids. 

And that reminded me of one of my very favorite photos of Maddie-the-Great.

It so happens that this photo is already downloaded to my computer and with a minimum of fuss I was able to find it. So I thought I'd share.

There she is our Miss Maddie at about age 3 (give or take a little) with her very first back pack! Obviously, this wasn't for real "School Days" yet. But she did like to take a bunch of things with her to day care. (You just never know when you might need a few books or an extra "lovey" or two!) She wanted to be like the big kids!

But first she needed to figure out the balance thing! There is a definite lean to her posture! In fact, she looks like she's just about to topple right over. Of course, she did figure it out, didn't topple at all, and she used that backpack until it was just too small to fit, but this first time photo captures the happy moment perfectly!

There might be a lot of kids with better balance, but I seriously doubt there is a cuter backpacker anywhere!!

Ya' gotta love this kid!