Friday, June 3, 2016

The Last Day Before The Last Day

Today is the last day of school.  Coincidently, my last blog post was on the first day of school.  (Clearly my "new school year's resolution" to blog every month was not a roaring success.)

This is Sarah's last day of fourth grade.  It's been a great year with great friends, a great teacher, and a great many positive changes.  There was much less of the Tweeny Edge than I feared.  Sarah cheerfully learned to do long division, learned to play the flute, and learned how to do many other things that added to the growing list of things my child can do that I can't.

It's easy to celebrate the end of fourth grade -- next year is going to be much harder.  Next year's last day will be THE last day of elementary school.  Sarah's school is great -- a comfortable, friendly place with fantastic teachers, principal, and staff.  I love walking through the halls and feeling the happy buzz of learning.  The middle school she'll attend is great too but parents do not walk through the halls on a daily basis.  The principal (who everyone raves about) reminds parents that they should figure who their child will walk to school with (AKA -- not you.)

This is all taking me back to the end of Sarah's preschool days -- the first of many school transitions -- when they told me, among so many other things, not to zip Sarah's coat for her so she would learn to do it herself in time for kindergarten.  My friend Margie, mother of four, reminded me there would be no orderly pickup in elementary school. I would have to get used to finding my child in the sea of other kids, some of them as old as 11.  I couldn't imagine my tiny child alone to fend for herself all day in the same school as those giant fifth graders.

Now, she is one of them.  And the list of things she has to be able to do by herself is much longer and much more terrifying.  For me.  As with all of this, she is fine.  She is ready.  Now I have to get ready.

But first, we have the summer and all of next year before that big day when she'll head out and I'll stay home.  May it go by slowly.

Happy summer, my big girl.