I feel like telling a funny story today, but the only funny story I have is that Day 2 of Kindergarten yielded no recovered skirt. Since Autumn had so adamantly insisted she put the skirt in her backpack, we’re thinking she may have put it in the wrong backpack.
I really hope that backpack belongs to a boy because right now I’m thinking about the pair of mittens we found in Autumn‘s cubby at school last winter. Mittens we, ahem, borrowed for a couple of weeks since they fit so well.
I guess that’s the way karma works and someone may very well be enjoying a brand new Old Navy skirt that was worn very, very briefly.
I told Autumn I’d give her a day to recover the skirt on her own before I got involved. I need her to feel accountable for her belongings and I wanted to give her the chance to be her own hero. Just to make things a little easier, I put a picture of her wearing the skirt yesterday in her backpack with a note saying she had misplaced the garment, so we’ll see where that gets us. I may even pay a visit to the school during my lunch hour to see if it turned up in the lost and found.
I do realize I’m getting a little too worked up over this skirt, and if we’re going to peel away the layers here we might be able to deduce that I’m feeling a little out-of-control with this whole kindergarten situation and that the obsession with the skirt is just a manifestation of the anxiety I’m feeling at having to let go of my little girl a little.
Her old school is right on the college campus where I work. At any given moment during the day I was just a five-minute walk away from her. It’s a small school where she knew everybody and everybody knew her. It’s a place where something could be left behind and still be there the next day (mittens excluded, of course). The place definitely made both of us feel safe.
Now I have to drop my child off at the school playground every morning and trust she’ll not only find her way into class but come out of it with everything I sent with her that day. I also have no idea what she’s eating or if she’s eating at all. I checked her hot lunch account balance yesterday and could see she had gone through the lunch line. Today? Nothing. The balance hadn’t changed so I called her at my mom and dad’s place and asked what she had eaten for lunch.
“A cheese pizza and a banana,” she said.
I did not send her to school with a cheese pizza and a banana, so now I’m left wondering if she stole a lunch on her second day of kindergarten.
The short answer is I DON’T KNOW.
But as far as the karmic scales are concerned, I still have four more free hot lunches coming if it’s going to even come close to making up for the loss of the skirt.
Enough about the skirt. I’m not going to obsess about the skirt. I can totally see this snowballing into a situation in which an APB is sent home with all her classmates urging parents to search backpacks for a missing skirt, and since we will be with these same parents and students for the next seven years, I do not want to become known as “the skirt lady” the very first week of my daughter’s elementary career.
But seriously. Can’t the kid keep track of her stuff? Thank God she isn’t responsible for a younger sibling because I’d probably wind up being the mother of an only child whether I wanted to or not.
{ 2 comments }
Hope this makes you feel better: I picked Nick up from his after-school care program today after work – its in the gym of his actual school building. We walk out into the hallway and he goes, “Mom. I think I have another one of these. Hold on.” He hands me his backpack and sweatshirt and goes running toward his locker. I was like, “What the heck?” I check his backpack – lunch bag, folder, name tag. Nothing’s missing. Nothing errant in his locker. He runs down to his classroom. There, on a desk outside the room, is a brown hooded sweatshirt, *very* much like the one I was already carrying, only I know THAT one is his. I look at the one on my arm. THAT one was not his. NO idea what caused the craziness that made him run through the empty school to find the right sweatshirt, but it was the only thing keeping us from taking the wrong sweatshirt home. I can’t wait ’til my Mabel’s Labels arrive!
Colleen – Mommy Always Wins´s last [type] ..The cuteness
I was just thinking about ordering some labels for Autumn’s clothes. She’s going to need them.
Comments on this entry are closed.