So, like, is the school year over yet? Because I’m exhausted, you guys.
It’s possible that my exhaustion stems from the fact that Kai never actually slept last night. Like he never slept. At all. He didn’t ever go to sleep.
He woke me up every half hour or so to ask if it was time to watch TV yet, to which I mumbled “No, go to sleep.”
He was in and out of my bed, doing what-all, I don’t know. I think he ate a popsicle and played with my iPhone, and if I’m a horrible mother because I didn’t get out of bed to check, just put in on the list of things I’ve done wrong lately, including letting him eat a sandwich that consisted of bread and marshmallows for breakfast.
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But seriously, I can’t remember ever having a worse start to the school year, including the one where two soft-spoken pre-school teachers told me that Kai should have his speech evaluated, the looks on their faces not those of concern, but of pity.
It’s not just this whole thing with Mr. X, although that is a very large part of it. The school day is also an hour and a half longer for him, he has to sit through 64 minutes of Spanish one day and writing enrichment the next, and learn to read on a “G” level and sit for a test whose entire raison d’etre is a baseline for gauging teacher merit pay, and while his teacher is doing a great job with him, it’s all a bit of a struggle.
His teacher sent me a picture of him today, fast asleep in the book corner.
And, aparently, he was crying in his sleep.
Oh, yeah. We've rocked it this year.
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I’m actually hoping that the teachers go on strike next week. I think the boy and I could really use a do-over on the start of school—just some unstructured time during which we have to stare at each other until we're remind why we like it when school is in session.
We had a lovely Labor Day weekend, the four of us Judys seemingly in tacit agreement that the best thing we could do was to just be together, which we did—at the park and at brunch and during a lazy last afternoon at the pool.
Kai swam around with his little green Dollar Store floatie, singing a song to himself.
I waded a little closer to him so I could hear what he was singing. He’s been making up little songs lately. That morning, he’d laid in bed singing, “Coconuts falling down, down, down, down.”
I wondered if the song he was singing just then was the coconut song, or something different, and when I got close enough, I could make out the lyrics.
“With my family,” he sang, “with my family, with my family, with my family.”
And it was instantly my new favorite song.
I dare say that it was the greatest song, ever.
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