Hey! Welcome to the very first day of kindergarten!
I know what you’re thinking. You’re all, “I know that child already started kindergarten because I read about it here.”
But then there was a teacher strike and we had some time off, and I figured that we could start fresh on the other side. You know, pretend that whole thing was all just a dream!
A horrible, horrible dream.
:::
So yesterday, I took the kids to get first-day-of-school haircuts. I washed their school clothes. I packed Kai’s Bento box with Sun-butter and jelly fixin’s and a little drawing that I made of Kai and me holding hands inside a heart. I tucked him sweetly into bed.
I wasn't convinced that we had been out of school long enough for it to feel like a true do-over. When we thought that the strike would be over last Sunday, I mentioned that we would go back to school the next day.
"No," Kai said. "School is yucky."
"That just breaks your heart, doesn't it?" my mother said. She was in town for the weekend.
And yes, it does. It breaks your heart. Because he's only in kindergarten, and there are so many, better opportunites for school to be yucky. Middle school comes to mind.
We got a reprieve for a couple of days, but in the end, we had to go back to school.
He got up this morning sometime before 4:30, stimmy and wired but cheerful. He ate his breakfast and got dressed, and didn’t protest until I got out his backpack.
“No!” he wailed. “I’m not ready!”
I shouldered the backpack and took out my phone.
“We need to take pictures for the first day of school,” I said.
That got him. It took us a while to negotiate the portrait. He wanted me to hold him upside-down and take the picture. But although I am strong and tough, I am not strong enough to do that.
This was the pose we finally settled on:
First day of kindergarten 2012
I got this gem on the way to the car:
:::
He rebelled when I tried to buckle him in.
“No school! I’m not ready!”
I kissed his nose. “We’re just going to try,” I said. “That’s all anyone can ever ask.”
Kai relaxed a little in his seat.
“Just try?”
“Just try.”
:::
And then we went to school on the back of a unicorn which followed a rainbow to a pot of gold. It was so awesome, you guys.
Of course, by “back of a unicorn” I mean my car, and “followed the rainbow” I mean drove through Bucktown, and by “pot of gold” I mean that Kai refused to get out of the car and tried to climb into the way-back, and the woman working the kiss-and-go line had to pry his hands off of the seat and haul him out of the car, where he kicked and hit, and I had to keep moving because I was holding up the line and the last I saw he was on all fours while his (new) paraprofessional was trying to coax him into the building, a vision that is now seared into my brain and will stay with me for the rest of my life.
So I did what any red-blooded American does when they feel helpless and angry. I called a lawyer. I went to boxing class.
:::
Later, my friend Annette told me she had an extra ticket to Madonna tonight, so I cancelled Kai’s speech therapy appointment and called Scott, who graciously agreed to come home early.
I guess there was a tiny pot of gold after all.