My son’s first day of sixth grade was not one for the Pinterest boards. It was a blooper reel. After careful shopping and planning, I realized I still forgot to buy the required combination lock, which put us behind schedule. I hastily snapped his annual “First Day” photo in the car in front of the school, with a sign I made from the plain side of a Frito-Lay snack box.

By the time he got home, finished his homework and went to soccer practice, the kid was so exhausted that I canceled family dinner and sent him to his room with pizza. Messy. But it worked.

When I told my best friend this story, she said that the first week of school basically functions on airport rules — the idea that time and order don’t exist between the baggage counter and the gate. 8:30 a.m. martini? Sure. Chips and orange Fanta for dinner? Excellent.

When it comes to the “back-to-school” period, as long as everyone gets fed, gets out and back home — ideally without gin involved — it’s all good.

Allison McFadden, mother of a second and fifth grader in Howard County, gets it. Her kids straight up refused to do the perfect first day photo thing last Monday, so she kind of winged it. “I was just happy to get a single picture,” she said. She also realized that she hadn’t gone grocery shopping and “barely even had stuff to make the kids’ lunches, so I was giving them leftovers,” she said.

They ate. It was fine.

Claire Duarte, a social media influencer known to her nearly 15,000 followers as The Columbia Mom, was “genuinely” shocked that her kindergartener daughter didn’t cry when she returned to school last week. “She does not handle transitions well, so that kind of wowed us,” she said.

A win! Duarte said her followers have shared their feelings about back to school and, like everything about parenthood, it’s complicated. “They’re ready for them to go back, but they’re feeling an emotional tug,” the mom of two said. “For me it was a mix of both.”

Giving herself a break has helped her deal with those feelings. “All of a sudden I felt the sudden urge to organize my whole house, which was completely off-base and unrealistic. I get that way every year, and like every other year, I didn’t get to it,’” Duarte said. She settled for cleaning her daughter’s room. “We didn’t finish the rest, and it was like, ‘You know what? We got her room done and that felt really good.’”

Rose Pulver, also of Howard County, has three kids between 3 and 7. Her practice is to have a schedule in place before the first day to “set the tone for the whole school year,” and then just let it ride. “I am a little more lax about behavior,” she said. ”You’ve got some big emotions going on at this age. I always expect the worst and then let myself be pleasantly surprised.”

Honestly, sometimes that’s what you get. Carrie Loughry has gone through this both as a parent and as a general music teacher of pre-K through fifth grade students in Howard County, now beginning her 31st year.

“In the first two weeks, I found that, if I did not meal plan or prepare food ahead of time, I was just gonna drive past whatever I drive past and that’s what I was gonna eat,” she said. “Everyone was exhausted. My daughter would tease me about my ‘fall-down night,’ and I said, ‘What’s that?’ and she said, ‘That’s the night you fall asleep on the couch and I just make a bowl of cereal.’”

In my house, that’s called Ramen Night. But we all have one. Loughry’s advice? “If you’re trying to do Pinterest all the time, you’re going to fully disappoint yourself. People put so much pressure on the first day. You really need to just focus on seeing what you and your child actually need, which is probably, when they come home, to sit on the couch together, eat something you love and go to to sleep. All of the other stuff is a lot of noise.”

Ma’am, we’re trying! You control what you can, which is very little. Pulver likes to spend the time before her kids wake up working out, meditating and “doing all the things.”

“You get those things out the way, so there’s no way they get pushed out and you create that time for yourself,” she said. “All of these are just learning experiences. You have to let go of the expectation that everything’s going to be great.”