the first day

Well, now for a full report of the first day of kindergarden. I picked up Katie at 2:45 as I am supposed to do. She was certainly excited about the day. She had eaten her lunch, chicken nuggets, mashed potatoes, carrots and broccoli, and that was good. And she had gone to music class, and she liked that. She said it was like going to church. At her daycare, they went to chapel on Wednesdays and Pastor Ralph came out and they sang about love being the magic penny and Jesus loves the little children, and If I were a butterfly. So music class is probably similar to chapel in her eye, though somehow I doubt they were singing the same songs.

Her big complaint was that during center times, the kids in the housekeeping center stayed too long and so she never got a turn. She had to spend the whole time in the art center and the numbers center. Those two sounded much more fun to me than housekeeping anyway, but she was upset about this. She said, "When I get in the housekeeping center, I am going to stay there the whole time because that is what they did to me." All I needed to know I learned in kindergarden, indeed.

I picked her up from school, sorted through all of the stuff in her folder, signed all the relevant stuff, and then we went to the pool and swam for 45 minutes. As if kinder hadn't worn her out enough. After that, I had a finance meeting at church, so I took Katie over to my parents' house, and she slept basically the whole time. So she took a nap from 4:30 to almost 6:30, and was still ready to go to bed at 8 and asleep by 8:15. She came into my room about 4:30 in the morning, but she then slept and was still tired when I woke her up finally at 6:30.

So a gigantic success. I just got a nice e-mail from her teacher saying that she has been wonderful. I have such a good feeling about the two of them working together for this next year. I don't know why, but so much of the insecurity melted away as soon as I had met Mrs. Massey. Maybe it is the same as the phenomena I mention in the post just before this one. I had all the insecurities of what a bad teacher could do to her, and never gave consideration to what a good one could do. And now that I have confidence in Mrs. Massey as a particular person and a good teacher, I can surrender some of that insecurity. And it melted away.

Hopefully, day two will go as peacefully.