Guest Posting at Meremade Today: Easy Pencil Pouch

Today is the day. This afternoon K fiiiiinally goes back to school. It’s the best day ever. For both of us. She’s been dying to go back to her favorite teacher in the whole wide world and I’m dying to have her there while M takes a nap and I do things. I have a billion things I want to do. However… I know that there are two likely scenarios. A) I’ll put M down for a nap and it’ll be one of those days where she refuses to cooperate and I’ll have to do deep breathing exercises to chill out from the frustration of a non-napping toddler or B) She’ll nap and I’ll sit on the couch and zone out from the complete strangeness of such a quiet moment and get nothing done.

Last year at this time, in the midst of all of the moving and home remodeling chaos, I realized that I’d have to make a choice and I wondered how we’d feel about school at this point. K missed the kindergarten cutoff where we live by about 2 weeks, so I had to decide whether to have her tested to push her on into school and make her the youngest in her class, or accept that she would be among the oldest in her class a year later. Why does that feel like such a weighty decision? One one hand, I think she’d be fine either way. On the other hand, is she going to be kicking and screaming to get out of the house in 13 years? And in this moment, alllll but one of her classmates from last year has gone on to big kid school. I wondered whether she’d be upset about that, but she hasn’t really seemed to notice. Adrianna’s Z and my K are a month apart, but will now be a year apart in school. Weird. But since our family is finally together under one roof, I’m happy with the flexibility of another year of preschool. I wondered whether I’d be ready to pay off someone for K to be in school all day– she’s such a curious and adventurous kid (read: non-stop supervision) that a year ago I thought that sounded like heaven. But a year of growing up has lengthened her attention span and expanded her ability to play independently. Now we both spend time working on our “projects” and that makes both of us happy.