Back to School

So I’ve been seeing a lot of first day back-to-school photos people have been posting online. In all of them, the children have on happy, excited faces. Caitlyn’s first day of school officially began this past Monday. Before that, she also attended two weeks of summer camp/school at the new kindergarten she is going to in preparation for the big day. Unfortunately, there are no happy, smiling pictures of her that I can post online of her yet, and I’m sure you can probably figure out why.

Caitlyn will be attending the kindergarten school branch of the school I teach at, so it’ll be convenient for me to drop her off before I head to work. Of course, with anything good, there has to be some sort of downside. And for us, it’ll be waking her up at 6:30 in the morning.

The wife is rather concerned about this. 4-year-olds need roughly 11-13 hours of sleep for proper development. Therefore, Caitlyn’s normal bedtime of 10 pm isn’t going to cut it. We’ve been getting her into bed around 8:30 these days, but after story time and rolling around the bed for awhile, it’s still close to 10 before she actually goes to sleep. A tired, grumpy kid is not ideal when you’re trying to convince them that going to school is a fun thing.

I usually begin the day by pulling up the blinds and noisily opening and closing the closet doors and drawers to wake her up in the morning. Wheee! What a fun way to start the day! This reminds me of the cruel and unusual punishment my mom used to put me and my sister through when we were kids. On weekends, to make sure we wouldn’t sleep in late, she’d blast classical music on the speaker system in the house and would only turn it off when we would wake up. No surprise that classical music is not my thing now.

Anyway, Caitlyn will eventually wake up crying about how she doesn’t want to go to school. This continues on through breakfast, changing clothes, and the brushing of teeth. Then the pace picks up when Caitlyn realizes that the time has come for us to leave.  She runs, I chase, I grab, and out the door we go. In the car, there are more tears and pleading until we get to school. That was pretty much our morning routine the first week.

The good news was that she would be all smiles when I’d pick her up at the end of the day. She’d say how she liked going to school and talk about all the fun activities they did. She even made a good friend that first week! It’s just unfortunate that she fails to remember the good times when she wakes up the next morning.

The second week of summer school was insurmountably better. Less tears and whining in the morning, no chasing around the house, and by the time we’d reach the car, she would be fine. Of course, the one day where she was near perfect also happened to be the last day of summer school.

Then came two weeks of vacation before the start of school, which meant we were back to square one this past Monday. I’m assuming the school purposely did this on purpose to amuse themselves. But we weathered the storm, and Caitlyn is slowly getting back into the swing of things again. Time will only tell when I can snap a photo of her in her school get-up with no tears in the morning. Hopefully sooner than later. And then there's also that issue of trying to make her fall asleep sooner. A nip of whiskey, perhaps?