Teo's First Week of Kindergarten

Teo started Kindergarten (for the first time) on September 2, 2009. We had gone to visit his newly built school for the first time the night before. It is amazing! It's a public, magnet preschool for three, four and five-year-olds. The building is filled with light, has a beautiful greenhouse filled with pint-sized wheelbarrows and other gardening tools, and a complete commercial kitchen scaled down for the preschool set so they can process and cook the product of their labors in the greenhouses and at the farm with which the school has partnered. Each class will visit the farm twice a month throughout the school year and people from the farm will come to the school to help them get the greenhouse going. There are giant plasma-screen televisions mounted on the walls in each classroom, as well as architectural blocks, beautiful wooden cars and a dollhouse that looks like it could be the set of "Lives of the Rich and Famous." Luke was very jealous and wanted to know why he didn't get to go there!

Getting Luke to school on time and then driving across town and into the next one to get Teo to school was nerve-wracking, but drop off was uneventful, and he walked right into the class to start checking out what the other kids were doing; I had to call him back to say goodbye and give me a hug! No separation anxiety there. At pickup his teacher raved about him being a "perfectionist" and told me he is "so meticulous." I saw what she meant when he showed me the story book he had colored about the little raccoon Chester from The Kissing Hand. He had colored very carefully and used a lot of different colors on each page. His teacher also told me that he is a sweet boy (I didn't need her to tell me that, but it does give me confidence in her as a teacher ;-). He was as bouncy as Tigger and happy as ever at pickup. In the car I "interrogated" him, asking as many specific questions as I could about the day to try to get info from him. When I asked him about the milk in his school lunch, he started bawling the way he does (happy to bawling in .2 seconds). Apparently he wanted the chocolate milk, but they gave him regular milk and didn't hear him when he corrected them. Then they opened it up for him right away so he was stuck with it. He cried about this little trauma for a while, and I assured him that he could have some chocolate milk when we got home, and we talked about raising his voice to be heard in a loud cafeteria. He didn't eat lunch at preschool last year so this whole lunch at school thing is a whole new animal, and Teo is such a picky eater that it may continue to be a challenge. Anyway, to change the subject I asked him about snack, which the school had provided. Another breakdown, as apparently he didn't get as big a handful of raisins as the other kids and when he asked for more they told him no. We talked that over too and got out all the disappointment which I'm sure he never voiced in school.

Being four is so hard! And negotiating a school cafeteria for the first time in your life? I could totally empathize with him. I think it's very difficult as an adult to put yourself into the shoes of someone so young and understand what it must feel like to be so entirely powerless over your own self. The only two things that kids can really count on having any control over is what they put into their body and what comes out of it, and we adults are constantly trying to micro-manage both of those things, too! It's no surprise to me, then, that Teo's two little first-day traumas were related to food. (And these are just the ones I know about because I specifically asked about these two things. Think about how many little moments I didn't have the right questions to find out about!) On Friday afternoon, actually, the school sent home a notice that too many kids aren't eating the snack and they're worried kids are going hungry, so they're going to try having kids bring their own snacks from home (which is the way Luke's school does it). I'm really glad because I wasn't getting anywhere after 48 hours of trying to figure out how to send him with his own snack from home without getting him beaten up in the school yard!

On Thursday morning (second day of school) Teo woke up on the WRONG side of the bed and was a total crab during the whole morning routine. Then he started telling me he was going to throw up. He would run into the bathroom and spit into the toilet. You remember the post here about the day he played hooky? Last year several times after that day he told me he felt like he was going to throw up when I was bringing him to school (although he'd have been fine through bedtime and breakfast, etc) so I didn't believe him and I told him he had to go to school anyway. When Tina came to pick him up for the drive, he got himself all worked up, and then he really did run to the bathroom and throw up! We didn't know what to do. He didn't have a fever or anything, though, and he actually acted totally fine after that, so Teen took him to school and we both were on the alert all day for a phone call to come get him. At pickup I asked the assistant teacher if he was weepy or anything during the day, and she said no, that he was great and they had a fun day. So although I do think it was a stressful week and that he does have some anxiety about it, he's keeping it together when he's at school, which is pretty much what kids have to do, even my huge high school students.

On Friday when I picked him up the art teacher was running the class. She came over and told me Teo is "very talented." I kid you not. Here's a picture of the self-portrait he drew.
Notice the thought bubble on the left with the letter "M" in it! Like Luke's self-portraits at this age, I think it sort of resembles Ernie of Bert & Ernie. Anyway, Tina and I certainly never realized what a little genius we had on our hands. It really makes me wonder what the teachers will say about him at the end of his second first week of kindergarten next year!