The New Kids at School

When I dropped Lucy off for her first day of school, I was nervous. The memories from last year were all too clear in my mind - passing a kicking and screaming Lucy off to her teacher and avoiding eye contact with all parents in the hallway. It wasn’t like that every day, she could go happily off to school for weeks at a time, but she definitely had her moments, her spit and vinegar days. She’s a love, but she’s a Scorpio through and through. I still sing praises to her teachers for their patience with us. Given her reaction to a school she knew well, I was concerned that a new school in her new town would be an even tougher sell.

As I walked into the school, I thought that at least Toby and I can feel like we did our absolute best in finding a school that would be a good match for her creative and independent spirit. Lucy’s new school, I’ll call it O., is ridiculously wonderful in my mind. The children spend the first hour of school just running around outside, playing, painting, climbing on the tree house in a school yard that is bursting with art projects, laughing children, and friendly, huggable teachers. You could quite possibly see unicorns flying around the yard and not find them out of place.

After signing Lucy in, I walked with her over to the art table and sat down across from her, wondering how to approach the topic of leaving her there. Two minutes later, an adorable little girl with brown braids sat down next to her, introduced herself as Charlie, and told Lucy that she could sing the song “Lucy in the sky with diamonds.” “Really?” I asked, trying to maintain the flow of conversation, “We should play that song for Lucy because you know she actually hasn’t…” but I was talking to myself. Lucy and Charlie were off, swinging from the monkey bars, huge smiles on their faces.

Since then, every day Lucy wakes up and yells, full volume, (she gets this from her dad, trust me,) “AM I GOING TO SCHOOL TODAY???” She loves it. She loves her friends and her teachers. She loves having some independence. I don’t know if it’s the school or the amount of growing up she has done over the summer or both. Either way is fine by me. She and I both walk in the school gate every morning with huge smiles on our faces.

As much as I was nervous for Lucy on the first day of school, I was confident that things would go smoothly for Evie. She has always loved school. At age three, after the first day of nursery school, she wanted to play school with me at home. “You pretend to be Mrs. Davis and I’ll pretend to be me and I’ll cry because it’s time for my mommy to pick me up.” I was glad for her independence, but I remember thinking maybe a teeny tiny bit of homesickness would be nice. She made friends immediately and was always eager to head off and see them.

Her school in California is big. There are six classes in the second grade alone, and each one of these classes heads out to recess at the same time. The other day she said to me, “Nobody notices me at recess.” All I could say was, “It will get better”, but this broke my heart.

I didn’t think there was much I could do to help her with it beyond talking about it, but today I decided to write to her teacher. She responded immediately to my email and said she was so glad I had shared it with her. Since she isn’t there at recess, she wasn’t aware of the issue. She’s going to switch Evie’s seat in the classroom so she is next to one of the “more chatty girls” and assign her some more in-class work with partners. My relief told me that it had been a larger concern to me than I’d even thought. When Evie went to bed tonight, she told me that she was excited because they have science lab tomorrow. It’s funny because she loves her classes (she is the Virgo after all), but I’m mostly looking forward to the night when she tells me that she’s excited about recess the next day.

Moving has brought our family a mixture of both challenges and exciting changes in ways that I never expected. After just a couple of months, Lucy is suddenly more self-assured and even-keeled. And, while Evie is feeling intimated with meeting people at school, I’m hoping that the challenge of making new friends is ultimately good for her. As parents, we try to smooth the bumps in the road as much as we can. But, since bumps and twists and turns are all inevitable parts of life, perhaps the more important job is just to help our children to see them as part of growing up.