I can’t believe that the school year is wrapping up and that my oldest daughter has now completed her first official year in school; she’s a Kindergarten grad! This past year has been her biggest year of growth in so many ways. I’m not quite sure how it happens but we send off little babies with backpacks so big they are dragging below their knees and we finish up the year with a little person who has already begun to have their very own life experiences.
When the year started, she was scared to walk to class. Unsure of where to go, or what would happen if she got lost. She cried when we explained that she would not be able to be walked into class each day and eventually Daddy would have to only walk her to the gate and watch her walk in. Now she confidently marches into school knowing her place. Thankfully, she still stops at the end of the hall and waves and blows a kiss to my husband as he drops her off. When that stops one day I’m not sure he will be able to take it. He told me that the first day she walked behind the wall out of his eyesight on that first day of Kindergarten, his eyes filled with tears as she just seemed so small in that big school. Now she seems to blend right on in with all the other big kids.
I remember the look on her face as we walked around her classroom for the first time. Finding her seat and meeting her teacher. She didn’t know any of the teachers around the school and everyone seemed foreign. Now she knows every teacher in the school and can even tell me which substitutes are nice and which one has no patience. She knows the crossing guards and is sad that one of her favorites is retiring. She went from feeling like all of these adults surrounding her were scary, to already feeling excited to find out her teacher for next year.
I pack her lunch each day and she came home one day during the year and asked if she could buy lunch. She was really nervous about going through the line and punching in a number and handing over money all by herself. We talked about it for weeks before she actually bought lunch for that first time. She said she wasn’t sure how it would go or if she could carry it all. My husband and I couldn’t help but giggle when we later spoke about just how sweet it was that going through a lunch line was such a big deal. But it was! Walking through that line in the craziness of the busy cafeteria was such a big and scary step for her to do on her own. The day she brought in the money in that zip lock bag she hugged me and told me she was “nervous excited” to go through the line. My heart stretched in that small moment because she still seemed so little and the world so big. When she hopped in the car that afternoon she told me it was awesome and even though she was scared she was proud of herself and my heart stretched again because she overcame another fear.
I have tears in my eyes even thinking back on all of these small moments over the course of the past year because she has changed and grown so much. She loved to talk about the dynamics of her classroom and the friendships and “drama”-yes in Kindergarten!-that occurred each day. She had her first projects and tests and learned so many new things that I am constantly amazed. I am pretty sure when I was in Kindergarten I was still just coloring but she reads, knows about life cycles, and her math will probably be too hard for me in no time flat.
There were so many moments over the course of this past year where I felt like I could see the “baby” in her fading as the little girl continued to emerge. That backpack doesn’t look so big on her anymore. It’s bittersweet as the pride I feel for who she is becoming could never be measured but I also feel that ache as she will continue to grow at what feels like lightning speed. I know that Kindergarten is just the first of many long years of school for her and we have a lot of changes still yet to come, but it feels like we have come a long way this past year. I hope that as she continues to go through her school years, and her life in general, that even when it gets tough, that she always talks to me about her fears, her excitement, her hopes, what’s happening with her friends and all the little things happening in her world with the same openness and emotion as she does now as my soon to be First Grader.
