sooperdooper, postscript

When I tucked Noah into bed Sunday night, he gave me an unexpectedly hard hug.  “Do you think school will be sooperdooper?” he said.

“I hope so,” I said.

“Do you think it will be like the sooperdooperLooper, fun but with scary parts?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“You should have put that in your blog,” he said.  So I am now.

The kids started third and eighth grade yesterday. We did the usual things beforehand.  We went shopping for school supplies about a week and a half before school.  June wanted to shop by herself, so she directed Beth, Noah, and me to wait at the other end of Office Depot as she strolled the aisles with a shopping cart and consulted her list. She did consent to let Beth pay.

Last Friday, June and I went to her school to meet her morning and afternoon teachers, Señora Y and Ms. P.  Señora Y has a reputation for being strict. I know nothing about Ms. P. When June introduced herself, Señora Y said she had “un apellido divino,” a divine last name. Then she spoke to the assembled kids and parents in such rapid Spanish neither June or I could follow everything she said, which worried me a bit, but June was too busy discovering that quite a few of her friends were in her class to care. She has fewer friends in the afternoon class with Ms. P, whose library, especially the Meg Mackintosh mysteries, attracted June.

All the third grade classrooms are trailers. This wasn’t a surprise, as the whole third grade was in trailers last year, too.  I don’t really mind. It’s a reality of a crowded school district and an elementary school with almost nine hundred students, but I simply refuse to call them “learning cottages,” as the school does.  June’s friend Megan’s mom once jokingly called them “learning shacks,” so I’m thinking I might adopt that, though “learning hovels” and “learning tenements” have a certain appeal as well.

Sunday night we went out for ice cream. It’s a last-night-of-summer-vacation tradition in our family, continued from my childhood. We voted on where to go.  I had the kids write their choices down on slips of paper and then Beth and I did the same.  Since it was the kids going back to school we decided if they agreed we’d go to their choice, and adult votes would be used to break a tie, if necessary. They did agree—both had written down Ben and Jerry’s—but I don’t think they would have agreed if we’d given our votes orally.  (For the record, Beth and I both wrote down Baskin Robbins—she was thinking nostalgically of her own childhood. I was thinking it was closer and therefore faster.)  But Ben and Jerry’s it was.  It was a pretty evening, warm, but not hot or humid, so we ate our last ice cream of summer vacation outside, seated at a table and on the cow statue.

Noah was revising one of his poem annotations, printing assignments and submitting them electronically right up until bedtime. In the morning he was up bright and early. Beth didn’t have too much trouble getting him out the door by 6:40.  June’s bus doesn’t come until 8:20, so we had plenty of time as well. Each kid posed at the gate for the traditional first-day-of-school photo.  (I spent a lot of the morning looking at other people’s first-day-of-school photos on Facebook. Many of June’s old preschool classmates have younger siblings starting kindergarten this year. I can’t believe all these babies are in elementary school now.)

As much as I’d been looking forward to the quiet house, it did feel strange and even a little lonely at first.  It was also strange to head off to Starbucks all by myself, to drink a latte and read my September book club book (Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist.) But it was nice, too; I won’t deny that.

June’s bus was ten minutes late coming home. She didn’t know why; it was probably just first day glitches.  She said “third grade was fun,” but she didn’t have much to tell me about it.  I asked if she could understand Señora Y and she said she spoke more slowly today. She didn’t have any homework. Noah was home ten minutes later, and not as lucky.  He only had one assignment, but it was the kind of open-ended assignment that often stumps him. He needed to write a letter to incoming sixth graders telling them what to expect from the Humanities magnet. So, he was up past his bedtime on the first night of school writing it and he was working on it again in the morning so Beth needed to drive him to school.

And we’re off… I’m hoping for a sooper doper year and I hope you have one, too.