Has it always been this hard?

Has it really always been this hard to get back in the swing of things? Today was AJ's first day back to school and Rick's first day back to work. Needless to say, things did not go as well as I planned. Let me first start off by saying, the day before AJ was supposed to be off for Christmas break, his school closed because of the snow. So, I guess when we got home that night, the only thing we (meaning AJ and I) were thinking about was the fact that were was no school for 19 days and there was plenty of snow coming down. For both of us, homework and everything else was "out of sight, out of mind!" So this past weekend, we finally "dug" AJ's bookbag out and realized that he in fact did have some homework. We spent Saturday and Sunday catching up on the homework. Over the Christmas break, AJ did do some reading on his own, which Rick and I were really impressed with. Then last night, we finally got everything straight for school:
* lunch box with lunch made (check)
* homework completed (check)
* reading calendar (check)
* homework folder (check)
* homework assignment notebook (check....or at least I thought! Found out this evening, it never made it into his bookbag!)

After getting everything ready for school including the uniform, I really thought I was ahead of the game. Then Rick got a phone call that he had to be at work 4 o'clock in the morning (there went my help in the morning). Whenever Rick leaves that early in the morning, I always have a hard time falling back to sleep and I am always scared I am going to over sleep, so I kind of feel out of sorts. As I am getting ready in the morning, the kids normally are eating breakfast, however, this morning, Ashleigh decided to sleep in and did not want to wake up. It was a struggle to get her out of bed and then get her to eat breakfast. After eating breakfast, AJ was getting dressed and he can't find his belt. We must have looked everywhere and then some. It took us forever to find the belt. I won't tell you that we found it in the bottom of his toy bin! :) How it got there I will never know. And of course, Diamond would take forever to go the bathroom and then she decided to she wanted to explore the backyard, which seemed like it took forever. By the time, we left the house, we almost missed AJ's school bus! Finally, both kids are in school and I am on my way to work, when I realized I forgot my check card at Ashleigh's school after paying this morning. The only good thing was I had not gotten very far when I realized it!

So again, I must ask.......has it always been this hard to get back in the swing of things?

Hope everyone else had a good start to their week!