First Grade Freckles: September 2007

4 September 2007 – First Grade: Day One

There’s a quiet, unexpected calm in my house. It’s eerily silent. It’s 10:30 a.m. on the first day of school. Mac is safely (or so I must assume) tucked away in my old second grade classroom, room 201. Sailor is inexplicably asleep. And I am flitting around the house dashing chores off today’s to-do list. I am much calmer than I expected to be. Considering…

6:45 a.m. My cell phone alarm tells me it is finally time to wake up. I am tired. I have already woken up no fewer than four times in the night. Once because Mac hit his head on his headboard. Once to pee. Twice to see if it was time to get up.

6:50 a.m. Sailor and I are in the bathroom. Mac appears. “Hey, 1st grader!” I say. Maybe if I act excited I can be excited. He aims his pee. “I am so excited!” he says. But then his face falls. He is nervous. He doesn’t feel good. He is going to miss us.

6:55 a.m. “Ok. What should we do first?” And why am I asking the soon-to-be first grader? Recently I have noticed a distinct lack of adults in my home. As in, there should be another adult to bounce things off. If we shower and get dressed first, we risk spilling food on our clothes. If we eat first, Mac will have to wait five hours until his next meal. It’s a dilemma. But Mac is hungry and chooses breakfast first.

Hot cereal. Fried egg. Banana. Toast. Milk. I require Mac to finish every last bite. I do not want him starving to death at school.

8:30 a.m. Out the door. There is no one to take a family portrait of us. I snap a few photos of Mac on the front stairs, mimicking the years of photos of my sister and me on our 1st days of school.

There are no saddle shoes this year. Just freshly-ironed nice summer clothes.

We walk to school. Keep conversation light.

When we get to school I dissolve in tears. “Don’t cry!” Mac is concerned. I feel bad letting him see my secret: I don’t want him to go to school! The new principal addresses the kindergarten and three 1st grade classes and parents. Mac’s class is called first. His teacher, an African American woman with corn rows and a broad smile, leads my backpack-clad, lunchbox carrying baby away. I want to hold him back! I want to scream!

I let him go. I am pained when I watch other parents follow their children to their new classrooms. No one said we could go!

After brief meeting, during which the new head of school tells us he wants to hear everything he and his team are doing right, I run with Sailor up the stairs. I help a couple kids open their lockers. Some of which still have scraps of Wacky Pack stickers from the 1970s stuck to their insides.

I see Mac’s new teacher, whom I have not yet met. “Hi, I’m Mac’s mom,” I say. Her look says, “Yeah. So?” Her mouth says nothing!

Sailor whines the entire time I try to chat outside with other moms. He is asleep before we get home.

No matter what I do for Sailor today, he has a very rough day. He is clearly mourning the loss of his big brother, his play pal, to 1st grade. He cries a great deal. He misses Mac.

Highlights of the day:
My child and his classmates were released for lunch recess without adult supervision.
Mac’s teacher is too uptight to give me the time of day.
It’s a long day.

Mac’s impression of the day:
“It was great!”
“My teacher is funny!”“…And very reasonable.”
What did you do all day? “Recess.” What did you do with the remaining 6 hours?
“Do you have homework, Mac?” “No, Mom, but you do.”

I take Mac to pick out the glasses our ophthalmologist says he actually does need. We stop in the comic book store. Mac takes us out to dinner at a Mexican place next to my sister’s house. The boys are exhausted. Day one is done. Around 9:30 p.m. amazingly!

Day 2.
6:45 a.m. My actual, real, hated, alarm clock rings. “Your timer when off, Mom,” Mac informs me. He snuggles up close. Sailor goes ballistic, having lost his bed spot to Mac.

Same breakfast.

Same walk.

No tears.

Former principal asks how yesterday went. I mention the unsupervised lunch recess. It’s chaotic the first day, he tells me. Really?!?!?!? I want to remind him that the school has been open since 1871. There have been 136 years of first days of school. You people are not new to this! I say nothing and he walks away.

Sailor attends both French class and soccer with his little girl friend, Taylor. There are no tears. He is shy. But he lets me leave. I am so amazed I am speechless. Sailor, I am so very proud if you! He is in a good mood thru both classes but when we get home he is tired. We go outside and do some chalking.

Picking up Mac is as chaotic as dropping him off. It’s a mob scene. I don’t know how the children are expected to know what to do. Or how the parents are. Day 2 and there have been no notes sent home.

Oh, except one. Which says that, based on the school supplies brought in yesterday, some of us seem to have had an incorrect list. Would it be inappropriate to send a note back to the teacher explaining that we were NEVER GIVEN A LIST?!?!? A few of us dug, and I mean we literally dug, thru the school website to find a vague (“glue sticks” How many?!) supply list. No list was emailed or mailed to us and no list was handed out at last week’s picnic. And yet, somehow, in this note from the teacher, the parents are blamed for not sending the right supplies.

In the chaos of after-school I spot Mac’s teacher. “Can I meet you?” I ask. I am friendly. Her look is not. “I am Mac’s mom,” I say. “Yeah. So?” her face says. I tell her my name and her face softens only slightly. I repeat Mac’s description of his first day and his impression of her. She smiles a bit more. She is an ice queen, to be sure. I am displeased, to say the least. She is not the teacher Mac or I wanted. I thought maybe, based on the opinions of all the people I asked, we would really like her. I hate her. But I am coming to see that there are no truly good choices. I am planning to call another neighborhood school in the morning.

Meanwhile, Mac says he likes first grade. But he is clingy, kissy, huggy. Melancholy?
And the other 1st graders are making fun of his lunch box. They are saying it is babyish. I will think of an excuse to stop by school at lunch tomorrow.

Can we say “home schooling”?

The best reason not to have children? School!

Day 3.
“It was an absolutely perfect day!” Mac exclaims after school.
The days are already starting to blend together. I am even unsure whether today is his 2nd or 3rd day of school.
Drop-off is chaotic, as usual – I mean, as yesterday. I get into it with a dad about the supplies list. We are both displeased by the lack of responsibility the teachers have taken over this matter.

Sailor and I shop for the remaining items on Mac’s new supplies list. I show up at school at lunch time. The office clerk does not quite understand when I tell her I am here to drop off the rest of the supplies that we just found out about yesterday because we were never actually given a supplies list and that I also want to see what is going on in the lunchroom. She looks so confused when I tell her I want to investigate the issue of the kids making fun of his lunch box, because I don’t want him to become a crazed teens who shoots out his high school because he was harassed in first grade!

I enter the lunchroom. I explain my presence to the teacher on duty. She has no recollection of having met me just last Friday. I don’t realize until later who she is either.

Mac is happy to see me but does not do the whole huggy kissy thing. He does as he is supposed to. An automaton in just three days. When the room fills I search out my red-haired boy dressed in his “Steve shirt,” a green and green striped shirt reminiscent of the one from Blues Clues. Not that he watches this anymore. But somehow he has always seemed to manage to have some manner of Steve shirt. This reminds me that he used to be little. That he is still little.

He is in the back corner, dutifully eating his PBJ. Nearby a girl from his kindergarten class last year is picking at a bag of popcorn. No wonder she is so skinny!

All is well. Mac sits across from George, a boy he met this summer thru his friend The Australian Girl. They would have been in class together if not for the last minute split to make a third class. “He waved his hand up like he always does, for me to come sit by him,” Mac tells me. Always? “The baby stuff is over,” he whispers to me, referring to the children calling his lunchbox babyish. The lunchroom monitor makes a short speech about the children being kind to one another. Mac’s teacher spots me and tells me she has already told Mac how much she loves his lunch box. Score one point for Mrs. S.

I am about to drive away from school when I spot two moms outside the playground. They are watching to see if there will be more than one adult to supervise our 150 1st and 2nd graders. There is not. Pregnant Mrs. K is out there alone. And the back gate, which leads to the alley where there is one truck with an open door and another backing up, is unlocked and ajar.

I guess Mac’s version of “absolutely perfect” is different from mine.

But he is happy and even tho Mama is not, I will give the situation a few more days. And then I will begin calling nearby schools to see if there is a safer place for my child.

Also I think it is unfair for the school system to think they can have my child for 6 1/2 hours a day! Especially after only keeping them for 2 hours and 40 minutes last year. Four hours would suffice this year.

After school we find a package of water balloons. One of the few things on our summer list that we never got around to. We toss them over the porch rail into the backyard. The kids are soaked. The kitchen is a mess. It’s a good time. Then we walk around the corner to find the source of smashing glass: the mansion being endlessly rehabbed on the corner. The boys are offered small “jobs” if we stop by every day. “How much are you going to pay us?” Mac asks.

It starts to rain. The sun comes out. We look for a rainbow. We look at inedible “poison” berries. The boys climb a pole to peel stickers off a stop sign. It starts to rain. We are in no hurry.

The boys get a long bath and Sailor’s breath-holding convinces me he should be in swimming lessons. The boys clean up while I prepare dinner. They color and do some rubber stamping while I clean up dinner. Sailor requests that I assist him in applying Peter Pan tattoos while I am burning Mac’s quesadillas (tomorrow’s lunch). I want to say no but I want to give my children a happy childhood. “Hold this wet cloth on your arm and count to 30,” I instruct.
“Ok,” Sailor begins, “One, two, three—“ then, “how do you count to 30?”

Mac asks what is for dessert. We rarely eat dessert. “Milk and cookies,” I say, except I have not even put away al of dinner yet. “You could offer to help me put these things away,” I suggest to Mac as he is whining that he wants his cookie.

I am totally exhausted before 8:00. For my ease, I invite them into my bed, where I read them a bedtime story. It is an old-fashioned scene, to be sure.
By 8:40 they are asleep. It’s still too late, but better than so far this week.

They are adorable. And still so little. “Why are you still so little?” I asked Sailor when he woke up in my arms this morning. “Because I am not 4 yet.” And then he went on to lament the unfairness of the fact that while he and his brother will get bigger, I will stay small! Yesterday he was worried that when I am 99 (which is how old I will be when he is 64, per a little ”how old will Mac be when I am …?” game, followed by the “how old will you be when I am…?” game) I will be wrinkly and sick. “I don’t want you to be wrinkly and sick!” he says, clearly distressed. I tell him I am trying to stay healthy and I put lotion on my face. “You should wear a hat,” he tells me. Damn, my kids are smart! Too bad I look better tan.

Friday. We made it. Our first week of 1st grade is officially over. It seems as if we’ve been doing school forever (but not in a good, familiar way – more in a tedious, exhausting way). It has been a long week.

My mom watched Sailor and his friend Taylor this morning while Taylor’s mom and I walked Mac to school and attended the first PTA meeting of the school year. In the school’s sweltering auditorium. There was free Starbucks, though.

Following the meeting we came back for the little ones, whom we found dressed up in a business suit and a party dress. I think they were playing StarWars and he was Luke, she Leah (or as Sailor is now calling her, “Layer.”). We strollered them back to school to help with the PTA’s calendar counting and distribution but were too late. So I made a valiant attempt to speak with the principal about the lunch recess situation. I was met by the secretary, who told me I’d be better off “outing it in writing.” Frustrated, I stayed around school, waiting to either see Mr. A or assist in the playground monitoring myself. The engineer, whom I mistook for security, found the head honcho for me. He reprimanded me for not coming to him first. “I tried. Twice!” And then he tool 20 minutes or so out of his really busy day to talk to me. “I’m an in-your-face mom,” I told him. “And I’m an in-your-face principal.” “Good! I need to know who has my child. And you need to know whose child you have.” I doubt he will ever not recognize me in a crowd!

After school Mac is too tired to even smile at me. He looked completely whipped out. I wait while he digs thru his backpack to retrieve his lunchbox to find his thermos. We are also killing time until the crowd disperses a little. Even with the new single jogger, it is a challenge making our way thru the throngs of parents, children, strollers and chaos. Better to just stay put until the crowd thins out a bit.

At home I let the boys put on their Friday night video early. I heat up a pizza. It rains. I think I could get them – all of us – to bed as soon as the movie ends. Except their father is due to visit at any moment.

We’ll sleep in a little tomorrow.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

First Grade – A Loose Tooth, Freckles, and Conflict

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First Grade Freckles

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