About my little schoolgirl…

I’m smiling. It’s because I’m thinking of my biggest little girl and how PROUD I am of her! She came home from the first week at preschool with all G’s on her progress report! That’s perfect, people! Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself–in case you didn’t know (by now you do), Caroline is now in school! I really stressed about it, but now I wonder why. Her teacher knows how to teach her. The cafeteria lady knows how to feed her. The principal knows how to keep her safe and how to contact me if she’s hurt. It’s been a smooth transition for her. She’s got this student thing down.

It all started with the first day of school:

 

 

 

She picked out what she wanted to wear the night before, I packed her a lunch, we put her breakfast money in her canvas bag we decorated with a mermaid, and her supplies were already waiting for her in Mrs. Hellam’s classroom.

We get to school (quite early because I have to get to my own school immediately afterward) and wait in the lobby for the bell to ring. When it does, we enter the gym and find her class’ bench and she waves me away. SHE WAVES ME AWAY. What? Did I want her to cry? No, but I wanted her to feel the impact of the moment just as I did. I guess it’s better that she didn’t.

 

When I pick her up she’s excited to see me, but close to the first words out of her mouth is, “Mom, you forgot my pillow.” (I was under the impression that they didn’t encourage pillows because of space issues.) Later that evening I ask her if every one else had a pillow. She looks me straight in the face, not complaining or anything, but calmly says, “Everybody but me….Not fair is it?” I could have cried. Wes and Lindsay laughed like crazy. That weekend I found a small pillow.

She has since just amazed me with the way she behaves in the one week she’s been at school. She’s more helpful. She cleans her room.  She starts every response with “Oh!” as in “Oh, yes, it was terrific!” She gets prizes almost everyday from the treasure chest for following the rules, which she can recite, and can tell me every person that didn’t get a prize, and who had to sit out for recess, and what she had for breakfast (she doesn’t like grits).

I look in her lunchbox every day when I pick her up from Ykids, the afterschool program, and she didn’t eat the cookie, or the marshmallows, or the other sweet thing I put in there. I assume Mrs. Hellams gets her to eat the healthy stuff first (wow.) and then she runs out of time. Everyone in the class has to go to the cafeteria for breakfast whether they eat or not, so we let her eat their breakfast. She loves it. She gets to have options.

She’s like a teenager, though, when it comes to getting any information out of her about how she liked the day or anything that actually involves her. I have to ask very specific questions. But it’s fun. I love to pick her up everyday.

When I drop her off in the mornings we get to see the principal feed the fish:

 

And because she didn’t get in trouble at all during the week and she had all G’s on her report, we celebrated with a sno-cone:

 

 

 

It’s pretty cool having a preschooler.