The first week

I guess the first week of school is usually a partial week so everyone doesn’t die from exposure to new bookbag fumes or something. But every year, I am just so grateful it’s only two or three days of school, even though I complain about it before—why not just wait and have a full week? What’s the point in just having two days? So you can survive. I’m sure the teachers and administration probably feel the same way.

Saturday morning after our first days of school I am uploading 212 digital photos to Target so that I don’t actually have to stand over that photo printer thingy manual selecting every single picture I want to print. Instead I can just select them all in one fell swoop and then wait an hour or so for my upload to complete. Now just in case you’re imagining that these 212 photos are of my children on their first day of school, don’t. These are pictures since Laura’s last birthday, back in January. Using my well practiced math skills—in other words, my calculator—I can count the number of months on my fingers and tell you that’s an average of about 26.5 pictures a day (and you wonder why Laura has trouble with math). Almost one a day. Of course, they’re really all bunched up around the two birthdays and the resulting four or five parties, not to mention a few trips to the zoo and aquarium, plus a random one here or there of Laura and Adeleigh or Will wearing his dump truck pajamas doing some cute thing like riding his giant stuffed Bullseye. Even though we took many of these pictures during school, there’s such a summer’s over quality to looking at them all, Will in his shark-covered bathing suit that afternoon at Carolyn’s pool and Chris and Laura kayaking and me with the Ferengi.

Summer’s over.

I am reminded again how much life Laura has outside our home. William is still mostly living in our own little Fantasy Island, despite the introduction of other boys eating their peanut butter sandwiches into the shapes of guns, but Laura really truly lives in another world now. She and I argued over school clothes, actually measuring one pair of shorts that I really could not believe were four inches above her knee (she won). I bought her one cool new outfit for the beginning of classes and then refused to buy anymore because it was too hot and she couldn’t wear any of the fall clothes we bought her now, and anyhow she’s on a growth spurt and will need all new stuff by October. I am not exactly one of those officially mean moms now, but close. Fortunately on the second day of school, Molly’s mother, surely as amazed as I am at how her daughter grew an entire head taller than my daughter this summer, handed down seven pairs of cool Mudd jeans that don’t fit Molly anymore, which Laura has been wearing around the house while I yell, “put on a belt, your underwear are showing again!”

She has told us just a few things about school so far. After-school Safety Patrol is loads of fun, but very hot (imagine, in your new fall outfit with three-quarter length sleeved sweater and boots). Her teacher says she hardly gives any homework (the letter home says it should take about an hour each night, so perhaps this is a matter of interpretation). She can’t remember if I’m supposed to sign her agenda every night (although I have this image of Ms. H. standing there saying over and over, almost droning, “be sure your parents sign your agenda each night”). She took quizzes in math and reading to find her level and did great in reading, she’s sure (long silence followed by a brief discussion of how she’d really forgotten everything about decimals). Her first spelling pretest doesn’t count, Mom (and a good thing too). Your basic beginning of school, and I’m old enough now to know that even though I did have that terrible moment when an absolute herd of vampire bats fluttered in my stomach when I saw her first spelling pretest grade that she’ll take the real test next Friday, and by then she will have remembered how to spell all those words again.

Actually, now that I think of it, this is quite a lot of information to have about the first days of school, a veritable flood of news. Especially compared to William, who like all preschoolers seems to remember only about the last thirty minutes of his day unless it involved some momentous event like a horse coming to visit their class. He tells me that a new friend was sad yesterday, but he doesn’t want to tell me why, he earnestly explains, leaving me to wonder if perhaps my sweet William might have something to do with that sadness. He can’t remember the child’s name, and if he was Baby #1, I’d probably ask the teacher in some convoluted way if William did some strange thing to some new child he doesn’t know, but since he’s Baby #2, I just figure that if he did anything really unfortunate his teacher would surely have let me know. So far, Miss Tammy is one of those clam teachers, who you watch through the classroom door just chatting up a storm with the kids, but who limits her communications with you to something innocuous and chirpy like Will had a busy day today! before she heads back to stenciling with Dalton.

Stenciling, in fact, resulted Thursday in one of Will’s first life crisis moments, which is directly related to his coloring problems: staying in the lines. Maybe we all were either little people who just color happily and shout “who cares!” about the lines, or else we were those practically suicidal children because the universe would shatter if we went outside them, I don’t know. But the only times I’ve ever heard William say “I can’t do it” occurred during coloring and stenciling. He’ll draw dogs and monsters all day, I suppose because he can make his own lines. William is sitting at the tiny table pushing the stencils away, saying more and more firmly as I ask him to just try, “I can’t do it!” And I’m standing behind the stencil table in the bright new Caterpillar room thinking mean thoughts about this unreasonable teacher asking my darling baby to stencil when he’s only three, when Peyton, his little friend who’s been with him since the Roly Poly room, whips her stencil off the page to reveal this perfect and I mean perfect daisy. Miss Tammy says, “Wow, Peyton, I guess you’ve done this before,” and William and I slunk off home, where I did not make him practice with stencils, you will be happy to know.

Chris has missed a lot of this, just getting the at-home reports at dinner, which are always much abbreviated than the pick-up at school version, when it’s still fresh, because he’s been busy starting his own classes. He came home exhausted and hoarse the first two days, I think from having to explain the dress code and name tag policy over and over again. Not only to students, mind, but also to the other faculty, as his administration keeps reminding them that peer pressure is important if any teacher is not enforcing the rules. Seems like in the fun old world of teaching high school, the administration is often as much trouble as the students. I understand this myself, from teaching college, since I have learned that at least students understand that you will be grading their papers, whereas your own colleagues and administration know you can’t do anything to them if they forget to show up for a meeting. My own classes start next week, which I can tell because I’m beginning to get my usual giant cold sore on my lip, always a sign of stress, and such a fetching addition to my own first day of school outfit.

Despite all these traumas of having to wear old clothes and stencil in new classes, both Laura and Will seemed happy enough after their first days. Despite Laura yelling at me in this anguished way as I drove up to drop her off the first day, “Don’t run over Sparkle,” the aged beagle that roams around the school grounds every afternoon, as if I actually might hit the old arthritic thing, she still doesn’t seem embarrassed to see me or when I wave at her friends on the morning Safety Patrol. Despite my insistence Thursday that William really could learn to stencil if he tried, he was still as happy to see me Friday at pick-up time as ever. Despite the administration and cold sores, Chris and I are still plugging along, and one night we actually had real cooked food for dinner, unlike the cereal we ate last night. All in all, not a bad beginning.