first day faces of kindergarten

I think what surprises us most about the first day of kindergarten is that it's not also the last. All summer I knew this was coming, and I planned for it, and we talked about it, and yesterday we went. And today we're going again. I don't think Jack's too happy about it.

Here he is, ready to go. First day of school! Yay!



We drove to school, parked on a side street, thanked the crossing guard (who happened to be the principal... I wondered if that was a First Day Tradition or if the volunteer just didn't show up), and walked onto the playground through an unlocked side gate. Jack beelined to the monkey bars, climbed halfway up, got excited to see a friend, slipping through the bars and scraping both inner upper arms in the process. This elicited a much-needed bout of sobbing and dancing in pain. I think both of us needed a pressure release: Jack needed to wail and I needed a crisis to deal with. I'm much calmer in crisis.



Daddy held Jack for a few minutes. Jack comforted himself with an in-depth photographic study of Dave's shoes.



He explored the playground a bit before it was time to go in. I hobnobbed with the preschool families I saw there. When it was time to go in I left him lined up with his classmates.



After my day with the new kids in my classroom at the preschool I went to pick up Jack. His class wasn't out when I got there and I stood talking with another preschool mom when Jack burst through the school doors and threw himself around me. "Can we go home now?" he asked. I said, "Did you have a good day?" He said, "Not so much. Did you know? We only got to play a little bit at the end of the day." When I talked to Mrs. M a bit she told me a lot of the kids asked, "When do we play?" and she told them, "This is kindergarten. We have a lot of work to do." She also told me she had three talkers and guess who was one of them?

It's nothing I didn't expect. I was hoping Jack would be in love with kindergarten and thrive in the academic atmosphere of a public school but I've always known he doesn't enjoy center time and paper-and-pencil work. There's a lot of that in school. At least he knows he has to go back today. And the day after that. And the day after that... and the day after .... well ... you get the picture