Kindergarten Wisdom

Lillie started kindergarten a few weeks ago. Impressed with being a "Big Kindergartener," she was full of information about What Kindergarteners Do. She came up with these ideas even before kindergarten started. She just knew.

"Kindergarteners always say please and thank you."

"Kindergarteners get dressed by themselves."

"Kindergarteners never get in bed with their mom and dad. After I start kindergarten, I have to sleep in my own bed." (That one lasted until the first day of kindergarten and then we never heard it again.)

On the first day of school, I was tying Lillie's shoes when she asked me, "How long is kindergarten?" I told her it lasted as long as her big sister's school.

She looked worried. "Oh, that's a long time . . ." I prepared myself. This was It--the homesick moment. My baby was going to say she'd miss me, that she couldn't be away from home that long--she might even cry. How was I going to stand dropping her off if she cried?

Instead she said, "I don't think I can keep my shoes on that long."

We have had the novel experience this year of having one child start kindergarten and another start college. Oldest Child moved into the dorm a couple of weeks before elementary school started.

Now, Oldest Child seems to have been born with School Luck. Yeah, she's smart, and yeah, she worked very hard at getting her high school International Baccalaureate diploma, and yeah, she should be very proud of her abilities and achievements.

Still, as a child, she did always seem to get lucky and get good teachers. And she started high school right after the high school had been completely renovated and the new addition was completed. The core of the school was built over a hundred years ago, so she got to be in one of the first classes to attend in a lovely old yet newly refinished building.

My main concern about college was the dorm. You know, colleges are still carrying on that barbaric practice of making kids room with total strangers. I was afraid she would end up sleeping six feet from some wacko with multiple piercings and ties to the mob, someone with a boyfriend named Dirtbag who would sleep over, making my daughter huddle in the hall with her pillow all night.

Oldest Child signed up for a dorm where they put freshmen together on halls according to their interests, and then have them do activities together--fun stuff, community service, stuff like that. She was accepted to that dorm. A few weeks before school started, we learned that that dorm just happens to be a brand new dorm, one where each kid gets his/her own room and shares a bathroom with one other person. She has wall-to-wall carpeting and her own microwave and fridge, all supplied by the university. She also happened to get a ground floor room, so no carrying stuff up the stairs. Her window looks out on a flowering shrub. My husband and I were jealous when we moved her in because her room is nicer than ours. School Luck strikes again.

The only down side of this is that she now has no motivation to come home. Heck, she doesn't have a room at home anyway. You can't find a four- or five-bedroom house in our price range in the neighborhoods we like, so we just moved into one with an unfinished basement, where four of the kids are sleeping. The idea is that we are going to build walls and finish it off, but we haven't yet. So Oldest Child can hardly be blamed for never coming home for a weekend.

Luckily, she's going to college locally. She can actually see her old high school from her dorm room window. And she's about a five-minute drive from our house. So we take her out to lunch once a week or so. She still comes to church on Sundays, and she borrows the car now and then, so we see her. And I have to admit I don't know where we're going to put her over Thanksgiving. ("Okay, you can have the living room couch, or there are extra beds in the unfinished basement, and you can share down there with your three younger sisters. Won't that be nice?")

I am not sure what I'd be doing right now if we had stopped with two children. Well, for one thing, I wouldn't be wondering how we're going to afford finishing the basement . . .

We have one more year to go before our last child starts kindergarten. I can't even imagine having the last one starting college. One day they're getting in bed with Mom and Dad every night, the next day they only come home for a couple of hours to do laundry. When the heck did it happen?

Maybe by the time our littlest ones start college, all college dorms will give kids their own rooms, and I won't have to worry about our kids getting roommates with boyfriends named Dirtbag. We can hope.