The Kindergarten Boy

I have to take a few seconds here to focus and calm myself. Deep breaths. Imagining I have access to a punching bag. That sort of thing. You see, it's bedtime. These days, it's usually not so bad, the kids do their thing, get to bed, stay quiet enough till they fall asleep. I usually have to lay with Alex for a good chunk of time, but I get some reading done on my iPod while I wait him out. Not so much tonight. Alex was tiiiiired. Too tired, one might say. He started falling asleep as we drove home from Grandma Newson's house today, at about 4:30pm. I kept him awake till we pulled in, and then he woke up enough to goof off until it was almost dinner time. He jumped off the couch just before dinner, and I didn't quite catch how he landed, but it sounded bad. He cried a lot. And then wouldn't settle for anything but sitting in my lap, where he very nearly fell asleep again. But the stove timer went off, and we headed to the dinner table. And while he was taking bites of food, he had his head propped up in his hands, and yup, you guessed it: He started falling asleep again. Jesse decided enough was enough, and ran to get him pajamas and a fresh diaper. But the process of getting him half-changed was enough to snap him out of it, and he spent another 15 minutes eating.

I guess we missed his window. Because from the moment I started getting him to bed after that, it was one big gigantic fit to top all other fits. He screamed (and I mean, screamed!!) about every single thing that crossed his mind. Brushing teeth. Pillows. Reading books. Blankets. Songs (not wanting them). Daddy. Not Daddy. Mommy. Not Mommy. Door open. Pee in potty. Daddy come back. Of course, only about 10 minutes into this, Jesse had to leave. Volunteered to help a friend unload a moving truck. And so there I am, with a screaming-at-the-top-of-his-lungs Alex, who only gets a million times worse if I try to actually respond to his screaming, or dare leave the room before I do something harmful because of the stress, and he's just not calming down for anything. Nothing at all!!!! So finally, I just gave up. I grabbed my iPod, turned on an audio book, stuffed the earphones into my ears, cranked up the volume, and just laid quietly next to Alex until sleep took him over. Which wasn't for another half hour, by the way. Every now and then, I checked to make sure he was still screaming about the same stuff (yup, he was), and went back to the audio book. Finally, finally, he went suddenly still. One minute he was screaming and thrashing, the next he was just quiet. Until about 30 seconds later he jerked (sort of like a baby's startle reflex), and went right back into screaming demands that won't actually mollify him. But only a couple minutes later, he was still again, breathing deep, giving into the sleep his body so desperately needed. I couldn't help but silently laugh when he moan-screamed in his sleep. Yup, he was out.

Of course, the second I left my room, I found Jacob standing in the hall calling my name, whining that Melinda was copying him (oh, the horrors of youth! How many times to I have to tell them, "If you don't say or do anything, there's nothing to copy"?!?!?). I may have lost it there a little bit. Okay, there was no may about it. I yelled, a lot. I threw stuffed animals and snuggly blankets out of their room with as much angry vigor as my shoulders could muster, relishing in the big thuds things made as they flew through the air and hit the opposite wall out in the hallway.

Hence the need to calm down. Writing it out is certainly therapeutic, too. ;)

So anyway, I wanted to give an update on Jacob's adjustment to Kindergarten, because I've had plenty of people ask about it. The day I wrote the last blog entry, with his giant problem in the bathroom, was the last bad day he's had so far. (At least, that's the last Ms. May has told me about. I haven't walked up to her to specifically ask every day, but I assume for now that if there were a problem, she'd wave me over to inform me like she has before.)

For a few days after that, I started watching him through the window as they transitioned from hanging up backpacks to sitting on the group rug. He's done marvelously, prancing in and sitting on his designated Polar Bear spot, right up front, and just waiting till his teacher got there.

He's gotten some Weekly Readers to bring home, which he's read to me enthusiastically. It's really hard to pry out of him what he did during the day, but Melinda's been pretty helpful at prompting him. Like when she sees his class go to the Music Room, she tells him, which makes him tell me a little bit about Music time. He doesn't answer questions about his day ("I can't remember"), but if something jogs his memory, he makes a point to tell me. For instance, just a couple days ago, I was in the shower. Jacob, out of nowhere, comes in just to tell me how he got to ride a trike during recess. Or, when Melinda checked out a book about butterflies, he came over and noticed the pictures of the life cycle of a butterfly, and excitedly told me about how they have "one of those" for tadpoles in their classroom. How they start out as an egg, get to be a tadpole, and as they get bigger, the tail shrinks!!!, until finally they become a toad. (They get to watch this for the next few weeks in their classroom tank!) He fills me in on just little things, here and there. But things seem to be going generally well at this point. Hooray!

He's gotten amazing at riding his bike to and from school. This same boy, mere months ago, could not go on a simple, flat walk without complaining every, single step of the way. We gave up on our idea of regular walks and hikes all around the area because of his attitude. We just couldn't stand it. There were so many things we could have explored as a family, but we just couldn't stomach the constant whining and complaining that he didn't have enough energy, couldn't do it, etc. And yet, here we are, just barely into the first couple weeks of school, and he's already riding his bike almost a mile two times a day- with hills!!- with no issues whatsoever.

Today he started out his day pretty whiny, and cried about a whole lot of stuff. We're not sure when he woke up, only that he was already up and the lights were on when we got out of bed at 7am. We think he must have simply gotten up way too early, because he was just having issues all day. It was the first day the idea of not wanting to go to school escaped his mouth, but he wasn't really serious about it. He still had a good day at school, and got to ride the trike again, which apparently is the best thing ever.

Basically, I'm thrilled that he seems to have gotten over the rough bits of the transition. Me, I'm still working on it! I'm already feeling the build-up of lack of sleep, and it gets harder and harder to pull myself out of bed every morning. On the plus side, we qualify for free school lunches, so I don't have to worry about packing lunches anymore, though I still have to come up with a snack for both kids every day (but that's way easier). And I've done my best with walking whenever possible to get to school. Taking Melinda there and back, taking Jacob there and back, and then going to pick them both up and back... it ends up being close to 5.5 miles of walking every day. A little exhausting... but I could seriously use the exercise, and I'm hoping to see some weight loss if I stick to it long enough. Jesse had the car yesterday, and between all our different destinations, I did 6.1 miles of walking, most of it with either a stroller to push or Alex in a carrier on my back. That much wore me out a bit, and I was sore and couldn't handle the thought of getting right back into it, so Jesse took care of Melinda this morning for me, and we drove the other two trips since it was laundry time at Grandma's house. But for the 2 weeks of school we've had, we've done almost every single trip on foot. Yay!

Alex is starting to take naps again, since Melinda and Jacob are both gone and giving us a nice quiet house in the afternoons. He stopped napping consistently right around his 2nd birthday (and it was really hit-or-miss before that, too!). So you can imagine how novel and thrilling it is to suddenly have honest-to-goodness quiet in the middle of my day, now! Of course, that just further restricts my window for getting things done. I've had a hard time trying to figure out when to do grocery shopping and other things that are out-and-about sort of errands. I only have a 2-3 hour window before I have to be taking kids to school or picking them up, and it just breaks my day up into such small pieces that I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the timing of it all. For instance, I don't have time to sit down and make a menu plan and a grocery list and go shopping all in one window. That would take too long. Instead, I have to be prepared with the plan and a list, and then run to do the shopping as soon as humanly possible, to make sure I still have time to get Jacob fed lunch before it's time to head out again. When Alex naps, it's just that much less time I have to work with. But it sure is nice, all the same. And when he doesn't nap, he's doing awesome at entertaining himself. I think it must be the novelty of not having an older sibling suddenly yank your toys right out of your hand. ;)

In fact, the other day - funny story - he was wearing a cape and pretending he had a lightsaber. (Thanks to the Lego Star Wars video game Jacob got for his birthday, he knows all about this fun new weapon!) He'd gasp in shock, tell me, "Bad guy!!", run down the hall, make some lightsaber sounds, run back with the bad guys apparently dead, and hand me a handful of pretend... meat. Uhh, should I be concerned about that? Why does a bad guy yield meat? Do I want to know?? And then he'd spend time cooking it, adding other ingredients, telling me it's not ready, all the while going back and forth to get more bad guys down the hall.

Tomorrow night is the informational "Back to School Night" for parents. From what I've already learned, Melinda will start getting homework sometime soon after that, but I don't know what the frequency will be like just yet. And I also don't know why all the information is saved for 2 weeks after school starts (I sure feel quite a bit in-the-dark about how lunch is scheduled and run, for instance). But I'm looking forward to learning more about their classroom schedules, plans for the year, and so on!