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We have safely navigated the first two weeks of kindergarten, and the little girl I thought I knew so well has begun a metamorphosis into an entirely new person. Again.
After so much buildup at preschool about "graduation" and starting kindergarten, it was little surprise that Charlotte was a bundle of nerves the entire Labor Day weekend and we all paid the price for her tension and stress. But when the First Day finally arrived, she practically flew up onto the school bus and when I picked her up that afternoon she was already in control of the place.
Charlotte is very good at sizing up a situation and determining where she fits and how to get the most out of it. She's not one to let others take the chances first and then follow along once the risk has been assessed, but she's not foolhardy like some children are either. That's not a trait she inherited from either of us, by the way. It's 100% Charlotte.
The stress she's been experiencing hasn't entirely gone away -- we've had a couple of incidents of regressive behavior that are clear signs of her anxiety -- but it's also readily apparent that they're situational and transient. It hasn't helped that all three of us have had our bits and pieces tossed into the air for a bit of a shuffle simultaneously; when you're a stressed-out kid, it's not a good thing to have stressed-out parents. Charlotte is likely to be done with her stress a bit sooner than either Bridget or I, but I'm hoping that we'll all be back on the path to normalcy very soon.
Due to the vagaries of having half-day kindergarten classes, Charlotte's day is a bit more patchwork than it was at day care. She only spends the first two and a half hours of her day in the kindergarten classroom. Then she moves on to something called "CARES", which is a supplemental educational program, and then finally to the unstructured "afterschool care" time which is more like day care. As it has turned out so far, the CARES teacher also seems to carry over into the afterschool care time, so Charlotte is with her for much more of the day than her official kindergarten teacher.
All the to-ing and fro-ing is only one aspect of the myriad ways the school people have found to complicate life. There is something that happens to the minds of adults who teach and/or work in schools that turns them into rule freaks. They send home reams of forms, papers, and Very Important Announcements every day and seem to have no lack for more administrivia to inundate us with. The kids weren't in school one day before they were being asked to start working on a fundraiser to bring in cash to pay for extracurriculars. You can go buy stuff from my kid here (drop me an e-mail and I'll tell you the login information you'll need to make sure the sale gets credited to her school).
In the middle of all this, Charlotte has managed to make several new friends. She is one of only five girls in her kindergarten class (out of about 17-18 kids), so some of these new friends are boys. Yesterday, as I was picking her up at the end of the day, one little boy followed her into the corridor and said "Hey Charlotte, don't forget we're going to meet in the cafeteria....woooo-ah!" and made a little thumbs-up gesture that would get an older boy slapped. I asked her about him on the way out the door and she told me he was her new boyfriend. When I reminded her that her "old" boyfriend (the one and only Parker) would be jealous, Charlotte turned to me and said: "Oh, Daddy, it's only bus love!"
I did not know quite what to say. This may take some getting used to.
We are well and truly in for it.
Posted by Bridget [URL] at 09/15/06
Brian:
I don't know whether you already read "Magazine Man". He is a marvelous writer; with all due respect to present company, my favorite on the web. He wrote about the same subject, more or less, about a week back and it's a good read.
http://masthead.blogspot.com/2006/08/in-which-we-are-consumed-by-orange.html
Posted by Suldog [URL] at 09/15/06
Thanks for the link, suldog. I'll check it out later.
Posted by Brian [URL] at 09/15/06
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