Raising Watsons

After a long, long summer, we finally arrived to the first day of school.  Did I cry?  Yes, yes I did.  In hindsight, after the Summer of Feelings I thought Tucker would have a harder time on his first day.  He was actually pretty cool.  I, on the other hand, was an absolute mess.

We have a new 30-40min commute.   In the car on our way to the very first day of school Tucker breaks out with:

Hey Mom, the hard part about babies being born is when the doctor has to take the shell out of the Mommy.  Then the Daddy has to hatch it.

….

:cough cough:

Yep.  That’s right.

#nottoday

Our sweet, darling daughter Emilia is a sneak.  At three years old, she scouts, plans and executes her ideas with startling precision.  Take the other night for example:

Heather puts her to bed.  Turns out the light.

A few minutes later, Ben notices the light on.  We go to her room and she has Heather’s handbag dumped out all over her room.  Ben scolds Emilia and re-packs the bag.  Ben then scolds Heather for leaving her handbag out in the dining room.

[[[Thing is, Heather always puts her bag in the same place every day, in the living room.  But whatever.]]]

A few minutes pass and the light in Emilia’s room goes on again.  This time, she’s wearing a princess dress that was somehow not put away.  Princess dress off, Emilia to bed, lights off again.

…Lights on, AGAIN.  Walking into Emilia’s room on the third time was a sight.  She had stolen the wooden cooking salt container from the kitchen -it holds all the really coarse salt – and emptied it onto her bed.  Where she was picking up salt rocks on saliva dampened fingers and shoving them into her mouth.

As Heather and Ben carried the organic, everything-free mattress out the door to dump off the salt, Heather couldn’t help but wonder if the cooking Salt had been left in the dining room as well.

Kindergarten has officially arrived.  After a long summer, some would call the “summer of feelings” we have arrived to the pivotal moment in our son’s history – First Day of School.

Summer of Feelings was a bit rough, to be honest.  Tucker could sense the stress that Ben and I have been under trying to make sure he went to the right school.  I’ve been pretty hot on an immersion school for the past year and had applied to a public school with a Mandarin program.  Both Ben and I really like the school.  Unfortunately, so do about 80 other parents.  We were far, far down the wait list.  In the meantime, we had a backup plan to go to our local school.  Which is perfectly fine, but not the language school I had set my heart on.

After a long summer and a lot of research, I realized that while we didn’t get accepted into the Mandarin program, there was still room in Spanish.  Why the principle doesn’t offer this information to prospective parents on a wait list, I do not know.  But I don’t really care because we got into the Spanish program.  When I began researching immersion, I was solely looking at Spanish.  With my Cuban heritage, I could not be happier with a Spanish program.

Tucker, meanwhile, has sensed the change in the air.  It has been a long summer for him full of anxiety.  At one point he said – Mom, I’m just so stressed…

I quite honestly told him – Me too.