My immediate thought, after my three-year-old daughter swallowed my wedding band, was: Well, I guess there really IS a first time for everything!

This past month has been full of firsts for our family, which is typical of early September. There were the first days of the new school year, with one daughter entering a new third grade class, one daughter beginning kindergarten, one daughter starting part-time preschool, and the remaining daughter resuming homeschool. We visited new classrooms for the first time, packed our first lunches, navigated the first day jitters (and completely forgot about the requisite first day photos!)

Three weeks into the school year, and everything still feels new as we struggle to find our footing, figure out who’s going where and when, sign up for extracurricular activities, and help our exhausted daughters transition out of their lax summer sleep schedule.

We are experiencing additional firsts since moving to a new home in early August, figuring out how things work in this house and how our land is best managed.

And, in less happy news, one of our daughters is undergoing treatment for her first bout with Lyme disease.

So many firsts, so much newness! But the wedding band incident trumped it all.

Click here to continue reading this month’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.