FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL, YAHOO!!!!!!

Ok, that was my jubilant parent response. I don’t know who was more ready for school, the kids or myself. So now that the first day of school has come and gone, here’s the recap.

Ok, so we’ve spent the night before making sure that all clothes are clean, bags are packed, schedules are located and alarms are set.

Somehow or another, I forgot to set my alarm and at 7am, I get a knock on my door from my son. Fortunately that’s when we wake up, but still, they had to wake me up. (chuckle) They were both dressed and ready to go so I imagine they had woken up quite early. I love that they like school so much.

Alex starts school a whole hour after Erica does so I first took her, and the other girls who walk with her, to school. I also needed to be there as the PTA Pres, so we get to school and the girls start heading toward their various classes while I’m talking to teachers and parents and helped direct traffic to various classrooms. The Schools hand out breakfast as the bell rings so that kids can eat something in their classrooms, and I observed Erica helping this one lunch lady get her stuff to one of the doors. I smile at this because I know how helpful and caring my daughter can be.

I walked up to Erica and the lunch lady asks me if I’m her mom. I nodded and shook her hand. She thanks Erica for her help and as my daughter heads to class, proceeds to tell me how helpful Erica is to her every morning. She tells me that Erica takes it upon herself to help this Lady get the breakfast supplies to the area where she passes out the breakfast stuff. She goes on to tell me how wonderful she thinks my daughter is and what a special spirit she thinks Erica has.

What parent doesn’t love to be told stories like these? I was so proud of Erica and I could tell the sincerity of the Lunch Lady’s comments because the woman’s eyes lit up as she talked about Erica. I felt really good. I’m so glad to learn that my daughter is such a special person to others.

I’ve always said that I had better kids then my parents got stuck with.

Take what happened next: I’m in the office after the bells have run and class has started, attending to PTA stuff. When the Math Specialist (who’s name I also can’t remember) comes in to make copies. She sees me and starts talking to me about my kids. She glows about Erica but then she starts askings about Alex. I tell her about how he’s starting a pre-algebra class, and she then starts telling me about how well Alex handles math concepts. She goes on to talk about how she dealt with Alex being the most advanced in his class mathwise, and how impressed with his emotional growth during his last year at Grout. (He’s come a long way)

He’s the kind of kid who hated transitions from one activity to another. Everything was a major castastrophe and tears were produced at every setback, frustration or percieved wrong. (Gee, I can’t imagine where he gets this from, *grin*) Anyway, something happened to Alex that last year, the tears stopped, he seemed to understand what was really important and what wasn’t, and he didn’t get as frustrated.

The Math Specialist asked me if Alex had told me the Toostie Pop story. I looked at her blankly, I remembered that one day he had a bunch of tootsie roll pops and had handed them out but I never had thought much about it. I’m pretty sure I asked him about it at the time but over the summer I forgot all about it. Well this teacher didn’t. On this one day , last year, she took these tootsie pops with her to each class as she did the final math lesson for the year. By the time she got to Alex’s class there wasn’t much of a choice left. As the box was passed around Alex, seeing that there was only one color left, passed the box to the next child without taking one. She asked him about it, and he simply told her that he didn’t care for that flavor. No tears, no “I didn’t get one”, just a simple pass on an undesired flavor.

She was so impressed with this, that the next day she brought another bag of tootsie pops, called him to her room and dumped the whole bag on a table. Then she told him how proud she was of his reaction and that he could have any flavors he wanted on the table. He looked at her and only took one tootsie pop. She looked at him and again told him that he could have as many of them as he wanted. It took another try of explaining that she was so impressed with his mature behavior that she felt he needed a reward which was having as many of those darn pops as he wanted. She chuckled that he still looked to her for verification everytime he took another one that it was still ok.

I don’t know how many of them he took, but I do know that he shared with several people. She was so impressed with him, and I was thrilled at the level of maturity that my Son had shown. I went home a very proud mom yesterday morning, and I decided since I still had 45 minutes before His school started that I would take him to breakfast at McDeath first. I told him about the story I was told and let him know how proud I was of how he handled the situation. He looks at me and replied, “Mom, it was only candy.”

I was so impressed. Here’s my kid growing up on me, and somehow I hadn’t really noticed. Well, I’m noticing now, and both of my kids are growing up. I’m so proud of them.

As for the rest of the day, all went well, both kids came back from school with homework and got it done in a hurry. Alex is a little frazzled with the new school schedule but he seems calm enough, and Erica has many of her friends in her class, not necesarily a good thing, I’ve warned Ginger that she can’t sit next to friends in class.

All and all , it was a great first day of school. And I got some bragging stories in the process. *grin*

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2003 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Family, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.