Preschool

Well, it's happened--for an entire school year I kept thinking "I really have to write about how Andres is liking school" and now, a couple weeks after the school year has actually ended for him, I'm finally doing it.

Perhaps this is an appropriate time for this post. The year has flown by, and we've been so busy with everything that it's been difficult to stop, take a breath, and take stock of where we are: a soon-to-be-5 year old son now finished with preschool and a toddler/teenage daughter entering preschool next year. I still can't believe that when Andres next walks into a school he will be entering kindergarten. However, I hold great hope that preschool will help cure Celia of this phenomenal attitude that she has developed over the past few months. And if it doesn't....well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

I think both Natalia and I were a bit nervous when Andres started preschool waaaaay back in September. He had always had a great time in daycare, but he was coming off a rough summer--sleep issues, lot of negative behavioral stuff, and eventually his surgery in August. He was still recovering from that when we dropped him off for his first day. Not to mention he was a shy kid; he struggled to make his voice heard when speaking to adults not related to him, and with a lot of the other kids already having developed friendships from being together for a couple if years, we wondered whether making friends would be tough for him too.

But though our concerns may have been well-founded, they were eventually proven hollow. He was fortunate to meet some kindred spirits early on in the year, and having established a baseline comfort level with his peers and teachers, he easily wove himself into the existing patchwork of the school. I remember sitting in our first parent-teacher conference sometime in the fall, listening to his teacher talk about how comfortable he was and how, despite some small blips, he was really coming out of his shell. I couldn't believe it. These were things I had always found to be very difficult (regardless of age), and he was doing it so easily. So effortlessly.

This continued through the winter and spring. Though he only ever told us about 5% of what he did every day, it was clear from drop off and pickup times that he had good friendships and that he had established a whole world for himself at school. This world included variants of tag with a Star Wars theme, bizarre nicknames for his friends, some inside jokes, and a split-gender chorus of "bye Andreeeeeees!" when he left. Can you be both supremely proud and slightly jealous of your child at the same time? Does asking that make me a bad person?

And then, seemingly a matter of days after we had first dropped him off in September, he was up on stage, cap on his head and diploma in his hand, being feted as a preschool graduate. Next stop: kindergarten.

I think next year will pose a whole new set of challenges. The curriculum will be more demanding, the days will be longer, and he'll be at a much bigger school with much bigger kids. Not to mention he'll only be a few degrees of separation away from all the nonsense pressures of MCAS. But I think this year has taught me something that I should have already known--he is his own person, and it's unfair to place my own inadequacies and worries onto his shoulders simply because I am his father. He's proven on many occasions already how different he is from me (one only has to watch the videos of him torching soccer opponents to realize that); I have to embrace that, and perhaps stop analyzing everything through my own life experience. But that's kind of what this blog is about...right? Now I'm definitely overanalyzing things.

We've talked about going to a new school next year, and he's looking forward to kindergarten. It helps that a lot of his new friends will be there too. But if next year goes any faster than this year...well, then it will feel like only a matter of weeks until he's graduated high school. And then I will really be a mess.