Kindergarten

Dear Alexis,

In just a few short hours, a bright yellow school bus will pull up in front of our house and will carry you to your first day of The Rest Of Your Life. It's the beginning of a new chapter, nay, the beginning of your new book. It's the first time in your life that will really, truly count for something. From here on out, everything you do counts.

Welcome to The School Years, kid.

The impressions you make in kindergarten will, in some ways, travel with you everywhere you go for a very long time. Will you be one of the Smart Kids? One of the Nice Kids? One of the Popular Kids? One of The Bullies? I don't know. I do what I can to protect and guide you, but the impressions you make will be entirely yours. I can't be there to give you hints as to how to interact with your peers. You just have to be YOU. You have to be the person you want to be, own that person, and be willing to defend that person. You'll have to learn to ignore what other people think.

It's something that is so much easier said than done.

I'm not sure you're ready to ignore what people think. I know I wasn't until I was much, much older than you are now.

But kindergarten? You are SO ready for that. You carefully selected your clothes for your first day and folded them gently on top of your dresser. Your backpack has been packed and repacked. Your lunch bag is in the fridge and holds many of your favorite things, along with a surprise or two that I hope will bring you a smile in the middle of a fantastic first day of school.

Alexis, you've been a little annoyed by everyone's questions about whether or not you were excited for kindergarten to start. I think you've sensed that maybe there is a reason you shouldn't be excited. You told me today that you're a little worried you aren't a good enough reader yet, which I suppose was your attempt at trying to guess why all the grown-ups seem to be leery of the idea of kindergarten. Kinnley Monster, you're more than a good enough reader. You have every reason in the world to be excited for the start of this new book in your life because you are going to love it.

You love to learn. You love it more than you love anything in this world. You and school are a match made in heaven because it will give you a chance to dive into adventures, explore worlds unseen, and accomplish things you never thought possible. You're going to make new friends as you travel down your path to greatness.

I know you are going to do great things. I don't know what you'll choose to do, I just know you'll kick some ass doing it. It's just who you are.

Enjoy this next part of your journey, Alexis. Enjoy every second of it. I'll just be standing over here watching. There is nowhere else I'd rather be.

Love,

Momma

P.S.

Thanks for still calling me "Momma," my little kindergartner.

 

I Will Pay One Of You To Do It For Me

I would link to a post that explains just how terrible Alexis is and always has been at sleeping, but that would require linking to approximately half of the posts I've written in the past five years. TOO MANY CHOICES. SO MANY EXAMPLES. SO LITTLE SLEEP.

Long of the short, I'd like to punch every so-called "Sleep Expert" in the mommy/daddy buttons and then lock them in a house with Alexis for four days. She would DESTROY them and their hare-brained sleep training theories. The fact of the matter is that the kid just plain needs less sleep than most humans. She DEFINITELY needs less sleep than I do. She has used that fact to systematically destroy me every night for the entirety of her life.

Accepting my fate has led to a sort of freedom. Truly. I accept that there is no hope that she will ever sleep past 6:30, she meets those expectations, and we're all better off not going to battle over it. My one parenting regret is that I didn't figure it out when she was six months old. There are a few million battles we could have skipped if I had realized I was doomed to fail, y'know?

Recently I have even managed to find an upside to the whole thing. While parents far and wide are battling with their kids to get up early enough for school, I'm all, "HAHAHAHA! She could sleep in 20 minutes and STILL be on time for the bus!"

NEVER ACCEPT YOUR FATE. NEVER LAUGH IN THE FACE OF OTHER STRUGGLING PARENTS.

I don't know exactly why it has happened, but I know it started the night we moved Alexis' old toddler bed to the playroom. We're painting the spare bedroom where it was stashed (some posts about that painting project are coming, don't you worry), so we had to evict all of the furniture that I was hiding up there. There was space in her playroom, so blah, blah, blah, the bed was in there and she thought that it was SUPER! DUPER! FUN! that it was in there and somehow she curled up in that bed and fell asleep right in the middle of playing with a bunch of dolls.

I left her there. I'm not dumb enough to move a sleeping kid when that sleeping kid happens to be sleeping in a bed.

The next morning, Alexis slept late. Like, really late.

The next night, she moved back to her room (SUPER! DUPER! FUN! is no substitution for being surrounded by Christmas lights and stuffed animals like she is in her own bedroom). She slept late again.

And the next morning.

And the next morning.

She's on a solid week of sleeping past 6:30. In fact, this morning she slept until 9:15.

I would be ECSTATIC about this fact, but DOUBLE-YOU-TEE-EFF? She starts school on Thursday. Her bus will be at our front door at 7:25. Things are going to be very, very ugly when I have no choice but to interrupt that whole sleeping in thing that I have so desperately wanted for the past five years.

I need a nap just thinking about how ugly it's going to get.

 

Ding Dong, The Whore Is Dead

Sometimes you don't need a baby book or video camera or even a blog to remember the things kids say. Sometimes those words just stick with you.

Like how Alexis first said "bye-bye" to her pediatrician well before her first birthday. That I remember perfectly because I told the pediatrician she was nuts if she thought Alexis was actually saying real words. Which, by the way, *I* was the nutjob that time. Damn kid has proven the point by not shutting up since.

Then there was the time that I had to quickly drag Alexis out of the grocery store as I mumbled, "Kids sure are cute when they aren't talking" because her two-year old self had told the big, burly guy with the Harley jacket that "Boys look silly with ponytails." WHOOPS.

There have been PLENTY of potentially embarrassing statements. Fortunately, though, there have been far more moments of pride.

There's the first time she made friends with a total stranger.

There have been instances when she (rightly) stood up for herself.

And then there is that thing she said on Friday, August 26th at 6:21 pm. There is that thing that I will remember and cherish and love forever and ever and ever. And ever.

On Friday, August 26th at 6:21 pm, Alexis and I were walking through a shoe store in search of some navy shoes for her to wear to school. The child somehow balances her Big Kid self on tiny leprechaun feet, so we had to meander to the toddler shoe section to see if we could find something small enough for her but intended for kids who know how to walk. (You think I exaggerate? I don't. She was wearing a pair of toddler size 8 shoes yesterday. I swore they had to have been all sorts of squishy and hurty, but she claims they weren't, which makes me wonder if I'm buying her 10s and 11s just because I refuse to admit her leprechaun feet are still THAT small).

As we walked down the aisle of toddler shoes, Alexis pointed and commented on every pair of shoes that she spotted. "Those are cute!" and "Those are for babies!" were common statements.

But then she saw them.

The Shoes.

Before I write the words that she said, I should mention that there are some things that are considered off-limits around these parts. Alexis isn't allowed to say "stupid" or "hate" or a few other words, mostly because she hasn't quite grasped the part of the ban where I say she can't say them when referencing people. Things can be stupid and she can hate them, but we don't say mean things about people. (At least not to their face. Ahem.) So, she can't say that she hates a teacher and she can't say that one of her friends is stupid and blah, blah, blah. Point is that I've been trying to teach her when the words are acceptable and when they aren't, but she's struggling with it.

So when we walked down that aisle at the shoe store and she turned to the pair of tennis shoes with Dora the Latina Whore's face on the side of them and declared, "Momma, I HATE Dora," I had to think for a millisecond.

And then I knew. APPROPRIATE USE! I'LL ACCEPT IT!

In fact, I might have to buy the kid a pony.