First Day of School

Both of my kids are offi­cially school aged now!  I don’t know how that hap­pened, but here it is, fall again.  The sum­mer is over, and sud­denly I find myself with a bunch of free time.  Right now I’m adjust­ing by keep­ing myself super busy and not allow­ing myself much time to stop and think.

The old­est one calls him­self Thing One, from the Cat in the Hat.  He dressed up as his favorite Dr. Seuss char­ac­ter and the name just stuck.  The lit­tle one also has a lit­er­ary nick­name.  It’s Red Chief, after the O. Henry short story, The Ran­som of Red Chief.  He’s got the hair and the atti­tude. My par­ents called me that as a kid, too, so it’s actu­ally an inher­ited title. “Son of Red Chief” was a paper com­pany, though, wasn’t it? So we’ll go with the aliases, so as to pro­tect the guilty til they are of an age to out them­selves on the internets.

Thing One is a sec­ond grader now.  School is old hat to him.  He slid out of one rou­tine of tele­vi­sion, read­ing, com­puter games, and bike rid­ing and into walks to school and a new class with remark­able ease.  He’s itch­ing to play either flag foot­ball or soc­cer this fall, but hasn’t made the final deci­sion yet.  I’m glad, because he’s a bit of a couch potato lately, and while we’ve been get­ting to talk a lot about some good books, I’ve been a bit lax about cat­tle prod­ding him to run and jump.  He’s also look­ing for­ward to Cub Scouts again, and all that goes along with that.  So he’s just great.

Red Chief has been very appre­hen­sive about school.  It started well before he was 5.  Thing One was clam­our­ing to get on the school bus as soon as he knew what one was.  Red Chief has been the oppo­site.  He tried to con­vince me that he didn’t need to turn 5 years old, because he didn’t want to go to school.  I pulled out the Rain­bow Cake and con­vinced him to go on and age another year.  While he was scared, he’d also been very pro­tec­tive of me, want­ing to make sure his Momma didn’t cry any more for any rea­son. He’s been say­ing he wants to take care of me, which is just proof he’s my kid.  Even the very first day,  he was try­ing to make a deal.

“Momma, if I hide under your cov­ers, they won’t find me!  They’ll just look under mine.  Then I can stay home with you!”

It was a tempt­ing offer, but I took him to school. He was ner­vous, but then he saw a cute girl with curly hair that was sad, too.  He pointed her out to me, and I asked did he want to talk to her.  He nod­ded, and said he could make her smile.  The lit­tle charmer went over and got a small smile out of her, and eased his own fear by tak­ing care of some­one else.  After that he was fine.  When I picked him up, I asked how school was.  “Momma, I was just kid­ding when I said I was scared.  There was a gin­ger­bread man  and we had a mys­tery and we found the clues and guess where he was?  In the LUNCHROOOOOM!  And I got to eat a gin­ger­bread man and I didn’t eat him like the fox did but I ate his head first!  Omnomnom!”