Shutterfly

I'm so excited! Shutterfly is featuring two more of my photobooks in their Gallery right now! The first is a book called This is What Kindergarten Looks Like that I made as a gift for Amanda's teacher. Several parents of her classmates bought copies as well. How cool is that?

The second is a storybook I made for the girls out of the last three years worth of Halloween photos: The Princess and the Pea and Other Halloween Tales.

The Amanda Report

Amanda is five and is enjoying Kindergarten but frequently complains that she’s not learning anything because she’s having way too much fun. Guess she must have picked up the reading and writing stuff from all that educational TV she watches. (Some of it is educational, I swear!)

She has not one, but TWO, boyfriends. I had one of those scary parental moments when I was taking these pictures of her and trying to get a real smile instead of the fake one kids her age are famous for. I was talking to her about all kinds of stuff and she mentioned her boyfriends and I asked her which one of them she wanted to kiss, fully expecting her to say, "EWWWWW! Gross!!!" or start giggling but instead she got this dreamy expression on her face and said, "Dante... no Anthony... no Dante... no both... can I kiss both?" Good thing I didn't drop my camera!

She's doing really well in school, in fact she just told me that she and one other girl are the only two in the class who have made it through all of the blue books, which is apparently a Big Deal. That means she's doing great at reading. That's my girl! But I've realized in the last few months that she's a total perfectionist in many ways. Homework can be incredibly frustrating because she completely falls apart if she makes a mistake. I still remember asking my mom what "perfectionist" meant after my own Kindergarten teacher called me one, so I know Amanda has it in her DNA... I'm sure she got some of it from her dad too.

I've been trying to emphasize that making mistakes is OKAY and part of the learning process. I'm always reminding her that everybody makes mistakes and it's no big deal. It took me a long time to figure out that mistakes can actually be a really good thing. Creatively, they can take you in a direction you had no idea you wanted to go. So my current motto is "Embrace Imperfection" and when I'm working on various projects I tell myself that mistakes are charming, kind of like a homemade quilt. I've come a long way... But I've also realized, in my effort to be a good example to Amanda, that sometimes I totally relax and don't worry about mistakes and other times I'm... well I'm a totally anal-retentive control freak. So I'm not quite THERE yet, but I'm still working on it. Nobody's perfect, right?

I've been volunteering in Amanda's class on occasion, which is a lot of fun. I don’t go as often as I would like because it can be tough to get a sitter for Alyssa but the teacher is so happy to have help that she really doesn’t mind having younger siblings along, so occasionally Alyssa comes with me which is always exciting.

Last week after a particularly long day of crafting with 5-year-olds, Alyssa was standing right next to me when the teacher said, “Let’s all thank Amanda’s mommy for coming to help us with our project.” So the eyes of 18 Kindergarteners and two other moms were all on me at the exact moment Alyssa somehow managed to tip over a shelf sending a flood of approximately 5 million crayons, 2 million colored pencils, 50,000 markers, buckets full of scissors, glue sticks, erasers, and every other school supply known to man into a huge mess at our feet. And all I could do was stand there and sigh. “Sure! Anything I can do to help! Same time tomorrow?”

The following conversation took place on the way home from home school today:

Me: So did you have a good day at school?
Amanda: Yep. Something really big happened today.
Me: Really? What?!?
Amanda: Dante kissed me today!
Me: (trying to remain calm and not crash the car) REALLY! Wow! How did that happen?
Amanda: I don't know. I was just sitting in the computer lab and Dante came over to help me with something and then all of a sudden he kissed my cheek!
Me: Wow! So what did you do?
Amanda: Nothin' I was just telling him not to do that and trying to get him off my cheek.
Me: Yeah? And then what happened?
Amanda: Well now he's my boyfriend for real. I mean since he kissed me. It's serious!
Me: It sounds like it. So are you two gonna get married?
Amanda: Yes, we are.
Me: You are?!? When?
Amanda: When we're all growed up. You know, when we're 16.

(Oh and just for the record, Dante is the blonde haired, blue-eyed boy that Amanda thought was so cute on her first day of kindergarten.)

The first day of Kindergarten

5:38 am

Am I too old to be having that nightmare where I oversleep and miss the first day of kindergarten?

7:32 am

At what point did I switch from trying to make this a peaceful, relaxed morning to coaching Amanda through every bite of her waffle,"Eat faster, eat faster! Do you want to be late to school on your very first day?!?"

9:25 am

Welcome to one of the longest mornings of my life. Kindergarten. Who knew it was going to be this hard?

Okay I suspected it. I was afraid that as hard as I tried to put on a brave face, I would end up a blubbering mess of tears. I thought that my pockets would be overflowing with wadded up Kleenex and that I might scare the children by sobbing loudly and uncontrollably. I thought Amanda would probably do okay other than being horrified that her mother was making a spectacle of herself. She’d be in the corner whispering to another kid, “Who is that lady? How embarrassing!”

Yesterday was my first indication that things might go a bit differently than I was expecting. Amanda went to a birthday party for a pair of twins that she has grown up with. She’s gone to almost all of their birthday parties and always had a blast. So I had absolutely no reason to believe this party would be any different. But do you remember those old Folgers commercials…the ones where they would show a scene in some five-star restaurant and a smarmy voice would whisper, “We have secretly replaced the regular coffee at Café de Foo-Foo with Folgers crystals. Let's see if these picky coffee-drinkers can taste the difference…” Well if that voice had been at the party yesterday it would have said, “We have secretly replaced Dione’s happy little social-butterfly of a daughter with a nervous kid who will be terrified if she loses sight of her mother for even a second.” I could tell the difference immediately and it freaked me out more than a little.

Since Amanda was a baby she has been happy to hang out with pretty much anyone, any time. I might have had a hard time leaving her but she never seemed to have much of a problem leaving me. Amanda has never been clingy, never had a problem talking to other kids or adults for that matter. In a situation where she doesn’t know anyone she will act shy for a few minutes but then she warms up, makes friends and ends up having fun. So yesterday was weird. And it cranked up my anxiety level for the first day of kindergarten, oh about 150%.

So back to today, the good news is that I didn’t cry… Well okay I teared up a bit when I saw Amanda’s name on a red apple hanging on the window outside of her classroom. For some reason that got me. This is Amanda’s classroom! How did this happen? But then I sucked it up and managed to keep my brave face on until I got home.

Amanda on the other hand? She was the crier. After a few minutes in her classroom, Amanda started crying and told me she didn’t want me to leave. “Please don’t leave, please stay with me, Please don’t goooooooo. I don’t want you to leave, Mommy.” When the teacher suggested that any kids who needed to go to the bathroom might want to go before she started class, Amanda said she wanted to go and she wanted me to go with her. I knew this was not going to be pretty.

As soon as I managed to cram myself, Amanda and Alyssa into the tiny little bathroom (with this tiny little kindergarten size toilet) Amanda had a full-fledged meltdown. The tears started flowing freely, and she was sobbing, “Please Mommy, please Mommy I want to go home, pleeeeeeease…”

On the outside I was smiling brightly and sticking with the, “Oh this is going to be so much fun, Amanda. You’re going to make friends and you’re going to sing songs and you’re going to love this, Sweetie, I promise,” thing, but on the inside I was thinking, “OHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhh nooooooooooooooooo… what if she doesn’t have any fun and doesn’t make any friends and they don’t sing any songs and she HATES this and we have to do this all over again tomorrow?”

It only got worse after that. Amanda totally wanted to leave Kindergarten but Alyssa totally wanted to stay. So Alyssa was fighting me, practically tore my shirt off while desperately trying to jump from my arms so she could play with the fabulous selection of toys while Amanda was sitting on her little corner of the carpet holding onto my leg, unsuccessfully fighting back tears because she wanted out of there badly. Did I mention that she was the only kid crying? She was. I think I was the mom that all the other moms were relieved not to be at that moment. The other parents were great though, very sympathetic. A couple of them tried to get their daughters to befriend Amanda but Amanda wasn’t having it.

The other parents were leaving a few at a time and I finally decided that I was just going to have to do it, just hug her good-bye and hope for the best. She tried to follow me out the door, but then she turned around and stayed. I stood outside with another mom talking for a bit and when I peeked in the window I saw that Amanda was marching around the classroom with the rest of the kids, miserably marching, but at least marching, which was a good thing.

10:08 am

I call my mom to report the morning's happenings and ask her how my first day of kindergarten went. Did I cry? Nope. Did she? Yep.

11:10 am

I had all of these grand ideas about how I would spend the four hours (actually 3.75 hours) between the time I drop Amanda off at school and the time I pick her up. Now I’m just mostly hoping I’ll be able to spend it doing something other than obsessively worrying how she’s doing. Is she okay? Is she still crying? Is she making friends? Is she having fun yet?

12:45 pm

So the first thing I noticed when I picked Amanda up from school was her huge smile. No tears in sight. (insert enormous sigh of relief) Her teacher even sent her home with a little red happy face paper, which apparently, in kindergarten teacher speak, means Amanda had a good day.

Actually according to Amanda she had a great day. Not that I was concerned. During crayon time, she wrote down her thoughts… She doesn’t write much yet so this was mostly just lines, not actual words, but she read it to me slowly so I could type it out for future reference...you know, like maybe tomorrow morning in case she decides to barricade herself inside her room and refuses to come out until she's old enough to skip school completely and just get her G.E.D.. So here’s the scoop on school in Amanda’s words:

"I had such a good time at school. I want to go tomorrow. I don’t know all the kids at the school but I know some. I hope other people get to come here on their first day and they have a lot of fun. I didn’t eat any of my lunch at school but mommy sent me some lunch. I did not get into trouble the whole time. I made three friends. Every day I want to go to school but I can’t because some days I have to be off of school."

In case that’s not enough for you, I asked her to give me the play-by-play starting with the moment I left:

• She cried for seven minutes (no, she can’t tell time) and then the little girl sitting next to her asked, "Did your mommy leave?" Amanda said yes and the little girl said, "Mine did too. Wanna be friends?" (Ahhhhhhhh…)
• She didn’t get to eat the snack I packed. None of the other kids ate snacks from their backpacks either. The teacher gave out pretzels but Amanda doesn’t like pretzels so she didn’t eat anything at all.
• They sang a song about Humpty Dumpty and an alligator song.
• There was a puppet table, a paint table, a play-doh table and a crayon table. The boys went to the puppet table, she wanted to play at the play-doh table, (of course) but there were too many kids and not enough chairs so she ended up at the crayon table where she drew pictures of me and Alyssa but not Daddy because he’s hard to draw with the beard, moustache and nose (?).
• It’s not okay to leave your stuff on the floor because one girl tripped over something one of the kids left on the floor.
• They can call the teacher “teacher” or "Mrs. P****r" but not "Mrs. P." One boy called her "Mrs. P" and she didn’t like it.
• They learned all about the letter “A” and tomorrow will learn all about “B”.
• She made three friends, one of whom high-fived her, without specifically saying that she was high-fiving her but that was okay cuz Amanda said “I was like, oh I know what you’re doing,” and high-fived her right back.
• The teacher was really nice and only got mad when kids didn’t listen and then they got time-outs but Amanda ALWAYS listened.
• They got to play outside two times and one of her friends fell down and scraped her hands up.
• They mostly sat on the carpet not in chairs and Amanda picked a square on the carpet that had a flower on it, but one time her friend sat in the flower square and Amanda had to sit in the boring old zebra square.
• When I asked her if there were any cute boys in her class she said, “Oh yes! The little boy who had to wait a really long time for his mommy was CUH-UTE!!! (She doesn’t know his name but he’s blonde.)

And best of all:

• She can’t wait to go back tomorrow.

Oh and as for me, I’m doing better too. We survived our first day of kindergarten and with any luck we just might survive the whole year.

Kindergarten Assessment

Amanda’s going to Kindergarten! Well at the end of August, that is. I know, it’s hard for me to believe too. Feels like we just brought her home from the hospital a few weeks ago instead of almost FIVE YEARS AGO. Somebody hand me a Kleenex, please.

Amanda went to Kindergarten Assessment a couple of weeks ago and I was a WRECK. That’s right, Amanda: totally fine. Me: complete WRECK. I remember my own Kindergarten Assessment and how stressed out I was about it because I did NOT want to go to school.

My brother went to school and didn’t like it so I wanted no part of it. I was perfectly happy staying at home playing Little People, watching Mighty Mouse and All My Children and having the toys, crayons and my mom all to myself for hours at a time. I think I wanted to fail my Kindergarten Assessment but when Mrs. Reynolds promised a treat afterwards I performed like a well-trained monkey. I got a fabulous piece of chocolate and a ticket to Kindergarten. D’oh!

For months I’ve been talking about how exciting and fun Kindergarten will be. There will be paste to eat, big vats of paint to spill on the carpet, boys to kiss, brown rolls of paper towels so hard you’ll get splinters when you dry your hands, games of I’ll show you my belly button if you show me yours with Tim Smith during naptime… Or maybe that was just my Kindergarten experience. But my point is that Amanda had no fears about the assessment or going to Kindergarten, which is how it should be.

I was nervous enough for both of us anyway. Because, let's be honest, I figured that if she didn’t do well it would be my fault. Oh and Scott’s of course, because he’s the one who vetoed pre-school. But I’m the one who didn’t demand it. I'm her mom and I should have fought harder for it.

Apparently that commercial about how going to preschool means you’ll do better for the rest of your life has not had quite the same impact on Scott that it has had on me. Some days it plays in an endless loop in my head followed by this nightmarish vision of Amanda out behind her third grade classroom smoking cigarettes and tossing beer cans onto the hopscotch field with all the other little thugs who didn’t go to preschool. These moments brought to you by: Mommy Guilt.

So back to the big assessment... we practiced for weeks: her letters, numbers, shapes, writing her name, basic math, anthropology, Latin, physics. Okay maybe not all that, but we studied and practiced. I took it as a good sign that her appointment was with a Mrs. Starr. Not only is star a happy shiny name, but it’s also the name of one of my very favorite teachers, Mr. Starr, my 6th grade teacher who is probably at least partially responsible for the fact that this blog even exists but I’ll write about him another time. My point is that I panicked a tiny bit when they told me, first thing, that Mrs. Starr was unavailable and that we would be meeting with the other teacher whose name I had a bit of trouble pronouncing. What? Uh oh.

But the teacher was wonderful and her classroom was happy and fun and Amanda marched right in there and… well I don’t want to say that she was trying to make me look bad. But she was. Yeah she was definitely trying to make me look bad. For instance the teacher asked her if she could count and Amanda said, "Of course," and then she proceeded to count to ten. The teacher then asked if she knew what came after ten and Amanda said, “Eight?”

You know how one minute you think you know exactly who you are and then something happens to show you that you’re somebody you don’t really recognize? Well that’s what Kindergarten Assessment did to me. One minute I was this totally laid back, low pressure, non-competitive you’ll get there when you get there kind of mom and the next minute I was - well, a crazy woman.

There I was sitting in a tiny little chair in the corner pretending to read a tiny little book while inside I was screaming, “Eight? Eight? EIGHT?!?” It was all I could do to just sit there and force myself not to turn into some obnoxious stage mother off to the side motioning like a lunatic to Amanda or loudly coughing “ELEVEN” into my hand… And then Amanda pulled the same routine with recognizing the letters of the alphabet and reversed the N & D in her name. While I’m thinking, “She KNOWS this stuff…I halfway expected Amanda to just whisper to the teacher, “Look, Mrs. P, my mommy didn’t send me to pre-school and my daddy doesn’t let me play with play-doh. I think we both know the direction my life is heading. Do you think I could take a quick smoke break to clear my head?”

Despite everything I’ve said to the contrary, the truth is Amanda did a great job at her assessment and the teacher said she had absolutely no doubt that she is ready for kindergarten. Highly questionable whether I am ready for kindergarten, but Amanda should do just fine.

As soon as we got outside I told Amanda what a great job she’d done, but couldn't resist asking her, “How do you spell your name?” “A-M-A-N-D-A“ Right, and what comes after ten?” “Eleven.” “And after eleven?” “Twelve.” “And after twelve?” “Thirteen.” “And…” “Mommy, can we go out for doughnuts?” “Okay.”