I almost cried today when I dropped Dillon off at school. Had to do some of the deep breathing I’ve been trying to learn in yoga class to compose myself a little.
He’s leaving with his classroom (and the rest of the 4th through 6th graders) to go camping at Nature’s Classroom. He’ll be gone for a week. And while I’ve been mentally and literally helping the kids to prepare for this (completely unprompted this morning Rose said she was going to really miss her big brother) for a couple of weeks, it just felt like the first day of three-year-old kindergarten again. You know that he’ll be fine but it seems like such a big step. When both kids started K-3 they were pretty solid. They weren’t really the kids you had to rip from their parents and the teacher hauled them, screaming, into the classroom. There were a couple of tears from them, but I am pretty sure I shed the majority of them when I got back to the car on that first day.
While I’ve obviously left the kids for five days when I’ve been at a conference, they were home with Charles. When he and I went away together for a week to a wedding in Mexico, they were with my parents. I missed them, but it was nothing like this. Dillon seemed totally fine, like he’s such a big guy all of a sudden. Though he did let me give him a kiss, which has been slightly less acceptable these days. I determined to hold it together, and it helped to see that when I was telling him to get organized and put his gloves in his coat pockets, that he already had a pair in there and that made us both laugh, particularly since I had thought those were MIA.
So maybe he won’t need someone to remind him in the morning that his shirt is on backwards and inside out. And that he should probably put on his socks before his boots. He might just be capable of handling all that himself.
Though when I turned around to sneak one last look before I left, I saw that he had slipped his hand inside his teacher’s as he was earnestly telling her about something, and I saw that little three-year-old guy again, just for a moment.
Tags: postaweek2011