Tag: school

children, humor, kids, kindergarten, mommyhood, motherhood, parenting

Ten Minutes

WFAM

My Type-A personality is slowly conquering the insanity of kindergarten drop-off.  My solution is to be there extremely early.  Full Speed has responded well to this.  He loves to get to school early (Type-A in the making, baby!).

So, I get the boys out the door by 8 a.m. and we miss all sorts of traffic and chaos.  The downside is we have to sit in the school’s car drop-off line for roughly ten minutes before the doors open.  No problem, right?  That is if you enjoy being in a confined, motionless space with the antics of Full Speed and T.Puzzle.

Me?  Not so much.

The first morning I tried this routine it was a disaster.  The boys went absolutely insane.  If they could have somehow managed to run laps in the truck, they would have.  Me?  I silently wished for a tranquilizer gun.  Now that could have been fun.

I regrouped.  The second day I had some hand-held electronic games to occupy them.  This turned into a no-go as well.  They couldn’t figure out to use them and their frustration only increased their hyperactivity.  Also, one of them manage to break their game which caused it to emit a high-frequency continuous beep.  For the life of me, I couldn’t get it to stop.  I tossed it on the floor in frustration and it kept beeping at me in contempt.  I still have nightmares of that beeping.

I switched gears again.  Quiet coloring activities seemed the route to go.  This is mostly working except for Full Speed’s accidental grafiftti work of the truck and his shirt with his dry-erase markers.  Of course T.Puzzle keeps dropping his artwork and color-wonder markers (oh, how I love color wonder, no mess on clothes or car) and this doesn’t help his mood.  To problem solve these challenges I discovered washable dry-erase markers (yay!) and now use scrapbook mounting squares to hold T.Puzzle’s artwork in place on his mini-lap desk.

What are these guys gonna throw at me next?

It’s only ten minutes is my mantra.

I can handle anything for ten minutes.

Well, except a homemade car bomb.

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children, happiness, humor, kindergarten, life in pictures, mommyhood

Buckle-up for Kindergarten

WFAM

Kindergarten D-day has arrived. There was so much traffic, confusion and general chaos that I forgot to be sad (mostly). I became single-minded in my focus to get Full Speed safely to his classroom.

It helped tremendously that Full Speed kept chanting, ‘this is gonna be the best year!’. If my kid was that excited about his new kindergarten adventure, who was I to argue?

Once I had us successfully navigated to Full Speed’s room, I felt slightly less overwhelmed. Again, I was thankful for my boys’ and their gregarious natures. Full Speed promptly found his cubby, deposited his Spider-man backpack and set to work coloring a picture at his desk. T.Puzzle pulled up a chair and sat down at the front of the class. Apparently he thought he’d like to start kindergarten, too.

Overall, a winning experience. There is still the labyrinthian system of elementary school drop-off and pick-up to overcome. Each day will get better I suppose. Either that or I am seriously considering giving Full Speed the keys to my truck and wishing him all the best. All I ask is that he keep the tank full and always, always wear his seatbelt.