First day

I just dropped both my babies off at their respective schools, and yes, I know they’re not babies. And it doesn’t make any difference.

This morning I actually had everything organized the night before. I had the new class paperwork already filled out, with the practically fifteen obligatory emergency contacts—always difficult since we don’t have any close friends or family in our town. I had the various markers and crayons and pencils and glue sticks and play dough all assembled in Will’s bag and Laura’s bags. We picked out school clothes and had them laid out with their appropriate shoes and tights, and even remembered to put Laura’s glasses with her bookbag. Chris packed lunches for all of us and loaded everything up in the car beforehand—because he had to be out early, since it’s his first day of school too—and we got out of the house on time. We were ready.

And still I dropped both off in their classrooms and got a little sniffly. This is a big improvement over Laura’s first day at kindergarten, but I am just not ready yet. I have a preschooler and a fifth grader today.

Fortunately while they’re growing up I am too. I was just sniffly, not even teary-eyed and certainly not hysterical (I have seen some of those parents the first day, and they’re not always moms either, you should know). I hard-heartedly told Laura I wasn’t going to park and walk in to help her carry her bags and bags of stuff, as about every single other parent in the school was doing that morning to judge by all the cars on the grass, and that if she couldn’t carry it all she could just leave the printer paper and tissues in the car and take them the second day—what would her teacher do, kill her? And William and I haven’t had time to find the perfect water bottle for his new classroom, so we just labeled a sippy cup to serve in the meantime. I finally know that he won’t die because he doesn’t have a new water bottle the first day in the Caterpillar class.

Of course this also means perhaps now that I’m a more grown-up mom, I also am a little less on the ball. My mother and I took the kids to the beach for their last two days of freedom—poor Chris had to work—and I let them stay up too late, and we missed Laura’s new classroom orientation and half of Will’s class transition time, which won’t, I expect, kill them. And we did have a good time at the hotel pool and the aquarium. We got a late start to baths last night too, so everybody was in bed later than they should’ve been, and unsurprisingly, people were a little hard to wake up this morning too. We used to start waking them up early a couple of weeks before school started to give them a chance to adjust, back when we were obsessive parents. Now I’m just happy when we make it to school on time. Adjusting expectations, I suppose.

But still, the first day expectations are pretty high. I don’t think the last year or two I managed the first day of school photo—this year I did, though. Laura posed for hers with tween panache, a little jaunty angle on the hip to show off her knee-high boots and mini-skirt to the best advantage. Which about killed me, I should add. William and his tiger dressed in their matching Panthers tshirts so he’d have some company his first morning, and in his first day photo he typically hid a bit behind the animal while he snuggled his sister—he wouldn’t pose for his own by himself. While I worried in the car about whether Laura’d have time after afternoon safety patrol to have her snack and also do her homework, she rolled her eyes at me and said, “Mom, they’ll save me a snack, they always do for the safety patrol,” as if I were the dumbest person alive even though we had this conversation a couple of times last week and she never bothered to inform me of this little detail before.

And William gave me a tour of the tadpoles and the farm and the new cubbies and his place at the snack table before he ran off to the climber in his new room—he climbed up two steps, turned around, and said (he really said this), “Have a great day, Mom!” and was off. He stood for a minute at the Caterpillar window and waved while I walked to the car, waving back—and then I rewarded myself with hot chocolate at the coffee shop on my way to school. It seemed a little crowded this morning, as a matter of fact—maybe a few extra mothers there today.