Retirement Cake and Second Family Love
🌼 Date: Thursday, June 11, 2026
⚡ Energy: Social battery running on fumes, but heart full
💖 Status: Popped in for retirement celebration and summer goodbyes
🥰 Outlook: Grateful for the people who make work feel like family
Today was retirement day and cake celebration time at work.
The district made time to recognize the drivers who have given their hearts, their time, and probably more patience than any one human should be expected to have, to the students they transported over the years.
Now they get to move into the next chapter.
More hobbies.
More family time.
More sleep.
More doing whatever they love.
And hopefully a lot fewer alarm clocks.
I wanted to pop in to say goodbye to the ones who are leaving, wish everyone a wonderful summer vacation, and just see some of the faces I have missed so much.
Eight months is a long time to be away from the people who have become your second family.
And in transportation, that really is what happens.
When you arrive at 6:00 in the morning and leave around 5:00 in the evening, working a split shift just to get your eight hours, you spend a whole lot of your life with your work people.
Honestly, you spend more awake hours with them than you do with your own family some weeks.
It takes a unique kind of person to do this job.
You have to love kids.
You have to handle chaos.
You have to wake up way too early.
You have to drive in the rain, the dark, the fog, the ice, the traffic, and whatever fresh nonsense the day decides to throw at you.
You have to be patient, firm, kind, alert, flexible, and occasionally able to pretend you did not just hear the most ridiculous thing from the back of the bus.
School bus drivers really do have special hearts.
Seeing retirees who have given 15-plus years to this work was pretty amazing.
That is a lot of mornings.
A lot of routes.
A lot of students.
A lot of memories.
A lot of lives quietly touched from behind the wheel of a big yellow bus.
And today, it felt good to honor that.
It also felt good to feel so much love from everyone.
The hugs.
The smiles.
The “we miss you.”
The “how are you doing?”
The familiar voices.
The people who have been part of my everyday life for so long.
Cancer has kept me away from a lot.
Work.
Routine.
Normal mornings.
My transportation family.
So getting to be there, even just for a little while, meant more than I can explain.
It was not a big dramatic day.
No major medical update.
No plot twist.
Just cake, hugs, familiar faces, summer goodbyes, and a reminder that I am still part of that family too.
And honestly?
That was enough.
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💗 Tina –
One Badass Day at a Time
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