The first few days of kindergarten I worried that Huck’s shy, introverted ways were going to keep him an awkward loner for some time.  I needn’t have worried, for now whenever we run into a classmate (especially a girl) I witness Huck as a popular, outgoing child.  He refers to his “best friend Nakayla” and clearly plays a lot with Yared, Autumn, Oriana, Isabella, Emelia and Gabriel F, his matching sneakers buddy.  And speaking of Oriana, when he says her name (which is often) he rolls the “r” in the most beautiful sound you ever heard.  When he really gets going he begins rolling the “r” in every word he comes across, including words that don’t have an “r” in them at all.

Here’s Huck with Oriana at the Little Red Lighthouse Festival sharing a hayride together.  Oh dear.

When friends ask where Huck’s going to kindergarten and I tell them “at a progressive education school called Muscota,” they ask what that means.  Since I love talking about it (and since I love the word progressive), I’ll go ahead and do so right here on the Adventures of Huck!  At Muscota instead of grades the teachers give students written narratives several times a year.  Instead of text books, teachers use “real books” to instruct the children on history, social studies and all the other subjects. Huck will have this very same class and very same teacher next year for first grade before going on to the mixed 2nd/3rd grade class.  When we have teacher conferences coming up in November Huck has to be there, too, for his assessment matters as much as his teacher’s and ours do, and he has a say in what he wants to learn next.   Along with his classroom teacher Marilyn and assistant Lucilla, Huck also has Dayna the drama teacher, Maggie the art teacher, Jackie the cultural studies teacher and Marian the literacy teacher come in and work with the class several times a week.  Every Wednesday morning the entire school gathers in the gym for Town Meeting where they sing their Muscota song (“We come from the river!  We come from the river!  Go back to the river!  Turn the world around!” etc.) and share their work and stories with each other, building community and creating confident public speakers.  I could go on and on and on …

Over the weekend Huck told me, “Oh, I LOVE school.  I NEVER want to leave.”  He also told me that his class discussed their hopes and dreams for the year, and his was that he wants to learn to read.  When I picked him up from school this afternoon he had over two thousand things to tell me about his very busy day.  The main news was that they finally got out their writing journals, something Huck has looked forward to ever since we bought them at Staples over the summer.  The children were given time to write in them and were told to use “kids’ writing” instead of “book writing.”  Kids’ writing, Huck explained, means they sound out the words and do their best.  Always up to a challenge (to say the least), Huck drew a picture from the Little Red Lighthouse Festival over the weekend and then chose the following sentence to begin his journal (I will be using book writing): “This is me stamping my envelope filled with lemon basil seeds.” 

I can’t imagine what this sentence looks like in his little journal at school, but the thought of it has made me smile for the last several hours.  And since coming home he’s been writing like a madman all over his notebooks and random pieces of paper.  “Do we use kids’ writing in this apartment?” he asked.

You bet we do!

I find it humorous and a bit ironic that the one thing I was most concerned about is the only thing Huck has had issues with at kingergarten, and that is School Lunch.  During his first week of school I sent him with a thermos of hot soup which he promptly spilled all over his entire lunch bag, ruining everything else I had carefully packed to go along with his soup.  One of the adult helpers (who I have a strong urge to hug tightly) cleaned the entire thing up and then brought him a pizza school lunch to ensure that he did not starve to death.  Another day I snuck a little fruit roll-up in his lunch bag, something until then he had never seen in his life.  I had this idea that each day I would surprise him with a little something, which seemed like a good idea, but the result was that he had no idea what this strange colorful rolled up sticky thing was and attempted to eat it, plastic wrapping and all.  He spit it out and threw it away, and when I picked him up from school he smiled and asked why I gave him plastic to eat.  Another day I had Troy making chicken fingers at seven in the morning so that Huck could have something extra special.  At the end of the day I discovered that Huck hadn’t eaten the chicken at all because he was afraid it had “too much gristle on it,” and so his lunch was a few pieces of cantaloupe and some yogurt, which accidentally got all over the bag.

At the end of the week I asked Huck if there was anything at all I could do to help him with his new school life, and without hesitation he said, “Don’t surprise me with anything in my lunch bag except your notes.  Always show me everything you pack in there.”  His eye contact was intense.  He was begging me to please, please, please stop making his lunch so complicated.

Mother of the Year.

The moral of the story: nothing wrong with a turkey sandwich.

The other day Huck gave me an extra rough kiss and then said in total earnestness, “Sometimes love hurts, Mommy.”

It got us talking about the ways love can make us feel sad, like when Shannon visited last month and then had to leave.  Or like when Max died last November, to which Huck said something awful like, ‘Well, that didn’t really hurt.”

Now Huck’s a professional kindergartener, walking alone into a classroom full of people he doesn’t know at 8:30 every morning and not returning to me till 2:50.   It’s a pretty big stretch for the two of us, seeing as how we usually spend all our days together.

(Then I started jury duty today, his second full day of school, but that’s another story.)

And while I’m very happy to send Huck off to this next big part of his life and while I can’t get enough detail about his very fun sounding 6 hours and 20 minutes without me, I am slowly but surely falling apart.

About a week before he began school I stopped sleeping, finding myself strangely worried about his lunch.  I began searching my friends and various websites for the perfect lunch bag with all the accessories (like easy to open containers) until finally I found myself on the floor of Target with about eight options in front of me as I tried to make the right decision.  After 15 minutes or so Troy came around the corner and practically whispered, “Is everything going OK?” as if I were a completely insane person about to receive shock therapy.  It was then that I realized I was secretly very worried about Huck going off to kindergarten, and all my anxiety was being shoved into a compact little lunch box.  With thermos.  (Which he had to get an adult to help him open today, despite our many successful practice sessions at home.)

In one week’s time along with the worry-insomnia I also got an ear infection followed by horrible allergies followed by a canker sore that made eating painful and nearly impossible.  And on my first solo grocery shopping excursion I bought him a cheapo butterfly silly-band bracelet from the gumball machine and it broke within seconds of being worn by him.

Huck’s right.  Sometimes love hurts.

A very brave and excited Huck began kindergarten this morning and has declared it to be very, very fun, much to the relief of his mama. Our day began with Huck and I both oversleeping past our 7:00 wake up call while Pappy T quietly read his book on the couch and forgot he was in charge of getting everyone awake. We woke Huck up around 7:15 and then began running around trying to get ready for school, frantically eating smoothies and getting dressed and brushing teeth. It wasn’t until I was taking Huck’s first-day-of-school picture outside our building that I realized he had toothpaste smeared all over his mouth and I had pieces of fruit in between all my teeth. We then met Luca and his family on the corner with all of our bags of school supplies in hand as the six of us hurried to the A train to go our two stops up to Muscota. Huck’s school welcomes families on the first day so Troy and I got to join other parents in the classroom for the first hour or so, at which time we retired to the lovely coffee shop next door and filled up on caffeine with each other. At the end of the morning Huck’s teacher Marilyn whispered to me, “I am in love with my class.” I think they’re in love with her, too. Now we get to enjoy a four day weekend thanks to Rosh Hashana, and this includes a visit to Chuck E. Cheese’s in celebration of kindergarten starting. Here’s pictures from our bonkers first day of school … and here’s to waking up on time next week.

Here’s our boy Huck, now a grown-up kid  who’s ready to start kindergarten, for Pete’s sake.  A new boy needs a new blog, and here it is!  The old one will still exist as a reminder that he was once a fetus and then a tiny little baby and then an inebriated neanderthal, but for the next while this is where I’ll sit and write about Huck the Great for all his grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends to see.  Kindergarten!  I don’t know how this happened.