Week 36 – The Last Full Week

I have come to realize that kindergarten has been an all-encompassing reality for me. Our lives have revolved around Mac being a kindergartener for 9 months. It’s an end-all experience. And it’s just about to end. And I feel as if I am about to become completely disoriented. No more 12:35 drop-off. No more Mrs. K… No more 1 folder in the huge backpack… Sidenote on the folder: It’s the same one. As in, while Mac needed a new folder by Christmas, I have not replaced it. It’s tattered and completely unrecognizable for what it is. I feel bad. I want to give him a new folder for this last week. Should I? Maybe just to be nice. I already promised him I wouldn’t do this to him again next year.

It’s a rainy Monday morning. We have errands to run but instead we putz at home. Sailor won’t clean up his room, which he has trashed in a frenzy of giddiness and so after enough warnings I bag it all up. He leaves the house in his raincoat and boots a screaming, crying frog in firefighter boots. Mac walks patiently beside us, still getting used to his new umbrella. He wears his firefighter raincoat and army man boots. They are not outgrowing things in the right sequence. Or something.

While we wait for Mac at talking doctor Sailor wants a snack. I open a Tupperware of peanut butter and crackers.
“How come you didn’t make peanut butter salad?”
“Peanut butter salad?"
“When you put peanut butter on.”
“On celery?” I ask, remembering the snack he is remembering that I brought here back in April.
“Yeah.”

It begins to pour right after we arrive at school. We bring the kids inside to wait outside their classroom. Mac, a French girl, the German boy, the Japanese girl and the Australian girl are called to the band room for their dental exams. Free. Why not? Save me a buck or two. He tells me after school he has no cavities. Hurray!

Sailor and I return his summer shoes to a local children’s clothing store.
“They hurt his feet.”
“You can’t return these. He wore them outside.”
“Of course he wore them outside. How else would he know that they hurt his feet?”
Why don’t shoe sellers (aside from Nordstrom) understand this concept??????

We stock up on future birthday gifts at Borders. There is a 75% off sale area. $20 for a big bag of stuff. Way to shop, thrifty mama!

Sailor does not fall asleep in the car.

Our fave French family comes over after school. We discuss how overprotective I am.
The kids are running and screaming though the house. Haven’t we heard this one before?

It’s early to bed night. But my dad is in the kitchen trying to unclog our kitchen sink. Not sure what’s down there. He is working hard so I feel too guilty to be in bed with the kids so I call my mobile phone carrier to pay my bill. An hour later both boys have been sent to their rooms for wacky behaviour and I am beyond furious with this company that is adding charge after charge to my bill just to be rude at this point.

Which is when I realize I have lost my checkbook. AGAIN!!!!!!!!! ARGH!!!! All sorts of bills are due and the boys’ father is not coming with a check tomorrow because he is not coming tomorrow because he is still in the hospital. I email my one-Saturday-a-month work gig and ask about picking up some days this summer. And I dump out my entire desk in search of the checkbook. Which I do not find. I am so scroooood!

French class called and both boys are in. On the day I requested. On a 50% scholarship. I only have to pay $410 for both kids for the whole summer. ONLY!? Sailor is thrilled. Mac knows I am going to pay him to take Sailor. And I upped the ante: If he is well-behaved he will get a bonus. I am wondering if $1.25 a week will work on a 6-year-old. I am assuming yes.

Sailor still wants to know if he has to go to preschool. Mac told him 4 times yesterday “no” but he kept asking til he heard it from me. I tell him preschool is closed. I think he understands. Maybe we’ll drive by tomorrow to show him that no one is there.

Tuesday. “I haf go preschool today?” This is going to go on forever!

We clean out my desk and the car in search of my checkbook. It’s still lost. But we carry no fewer than 5 bags of recyclables, garbage, clothes, food and toys out of my car. The kitchen sink is still clogged. The kitchen is a consequent mess.

Over lunch Mac makes the following observations: “Mom, you are like a servant.” Pause. “Can you get me some ketchup?” But later as we are discussing something purple on my eye (eye liner? Veins? I have no idea.) Mac tells me, “You look pretty no matter what you are wearing.” He earns big hugs for that one.

At school I return some old yearbooks to the yearbook editor. “Next year I’ll do 1st grade and kindergarten,” I offer, by way of solidifying my commitment to help her out again next year. She goes on and on about having to meet with the new principal to see whether he liked the way I placed my photos without space around them or the way she placed hers with space better. And … on and on and all I wanted to do was tell her I’d help out again next year. Maybe she didn’t appreciate my artistic style. I think my pages are great!

“How do you make an apple?” Sailor asks on the way home. I explain about seeds and apple trees.
“You can plant money!” he informs me.
“Yeah? And what happens?” I ask. I am hopeful.
“You get a money tree.” Oh, Baby, if only!

Then a bit later, “Why do the white things on the dandelions blow away so easily.”
I explain about germination.
“Wow that’s deep!” I think he means my explanation. I am impressed by his adult response. Then, “Look at that puddle, Mommy!”

He lies back in the stroller a block from home, just as I am beginning to wonder if he should start giving up his naps. I walk around the block to give him time to settle into slumber before I bring him inside. My body is weary and I could use a nap myself.

Mac has a friend over after school. A boy of Swedish decent who has a slight accent, though I believe he was born here. He does not understand why he has to hold onto the stroller when we cross the streets and wants to know how soon til we’re at Mac’s house. This boy lives a ½ block from school, so our 6-block walk is a bit much for him.
The boy is well-behaved and I am pleased.

My sister comes over. Anna and her girls come over. We are all eight of us in the kitchen eating pizza and salad and drinking wine (just the adults) when the little boy’s dad and sister come for him. What a sight we must seem! The house is a mess and the kitchen is particularly bad, but everyone is happy.

I am tired and feel sick and want to go to bed. Sailor says, “So go to bed.” I do. The kids join me. My sister leaves.

Wednesday Sailor tries to not play soccer again. I take him into the bathroom to tell him how old this is getting. He goes back in to play. We have a play date planned with the triplets after soccer. We are almost 45 minutes late because there is no parking by their house and I can’t even get to the front of my house to check there for a spot.

Mac rides to school with the triplets, the only car I let him ride in besides my own. Sailor cries about how it’s not ok for Mac to go with them. I start to get nervous.
“Is something going to happen to him?”
“No!” He is just tired and feeling slighted.
“Ok, I won’t let him ride to school with them next time,” I promise. An easy promise to make as school ends before next Wednesday and the triplets’ family is planning to move away before the next school year.

I take Sailor to the Children’s Place to pay my charge card bill. We go to Old Navy to look around. My sister shows up. I spend $29 I don’t have. Sailor is asleep when I get home. We get a rock star parking spot. My boyfriend from two summers ago shows up as I am getting Sailor out of the car. He’s here to fix my clogged sink. Which I have apparently fixed myself as there is no clog when I run the water. He runs hot water to clear the pipes of the corrosive drano and checks to be sure the sink will drain if full. The sink is fixed in a matter of minutes. We have to find other ways to fill the rest of the hour he has set aside to help me out.

My dad makes me call the plumber to tell him the sink no longer needs fixing.

It’s chilly out and Sailor is still asleep. I carry him to the stroller and pick up Mac. When he wakes up after we drop Mac at FTK he asks me why he is sleeping in the stroller. I explain that he fell asleep in the car and then he slept on the sofa… “Who babysat me?” he wants to know. Then, “Where’s Mac?” This must be so weird for him to fall asleep in the car and wake up in the stroller.

8:30 pm. One hour and 10 minutes earlier Sailor asks for 10 more minutes to play. Which I grant. I begin the bed-time routine, as it were, at 7:30. At 8:30 I am carrying a crying Sailor back to his bed. Mac is crestfallen that I have had to yell at them both. Why are we still up an HOUR after I started to put them to bed. An HOUR! This should take maybe 30 minutes! At the most. The have their pj’s on, they have had stories read, they have both eaten snacks (which they requested at 8:00) and now it’s 8:30! THIS IS WHY I AM TIRED!

2:15 A.M. Sailor is in my bed. I bring him back to his own. He comes right back out, as he did last night. “We’re staying in our own beds all night tonight, remember?” I am gentle.
“I can’t. I am scared.”
“Of what?”
“Of the flump?”
“The flump? What flump?”
“The ka-chunk.”
Oh boy. “Ok, let’s go see.”
I carry him back in and locate the source of the flump and ka-chunk.
“We just have to close your window.” I do. He asks for one more blanket.
I’m starving!

Friday. The last one of the school year. There’s already a finality to things, yet we keep going on as if everything is not about to change completely. Plans are being discussed: the German family will return to Germany for a month, my fave French family is traveling to Mexico for two weeks, the triplets will be in Michigan for most of the summer… Our plans? The beach! Just blocks from our home and a real city getaway that doesn’t cost a dime.

But I am getting ahead of myself. And that is how it seems: as if we are already partly entrenched in a summer routine that just happens to still involve a 12:30 drop-off every afternoon; while at the same time things feel very much the same yet very different. Play date next Monday? Ok, but there are only two days left of school. There is some contradiction that is inexplicable.

I oversleep this morning and cannot make it to the last PTA meeting of the year. Bummer. I miss PTA closet cleanout. Bummer. Not! I have to stay home with my children, out of priority over dashing around and running out the door 15 minutes after waking up. Mac was upset when I went to Dr. T’s retirement party last night. Today he wants to know when I am leaving! I can’t deal. Sailor is whiny about what he wants to eat (Pirates’ Booty is not breakfast!) and I have to yell before I go pee except I have no voice with which to make myself heard this morning.
We make rice krispies treats for the boys’ father, whose birthday is Sunday but whom we will see this evening. We clean up a bit. Mac’s homework is about fractions and I am instructed to make a sandwich and discuss the names of each fraction I cut the sandwich into. Good thing we didn’t have plans to go out to lunch today. I also have to cut an apple. Mac wants the apple slices to resemble les papillons, which throws off the project a slight bit but I record our activity in French and English. Sigh… I don’t know that I have met my end-of-year goal of being able to converse through a dinner party entirely in French. Though I did partake in several French conversations yesterday.

We walk to school, both boys in the stroller. Halfway there I ask Mac if he can please get out and walk beside me. He says, “No.” I stop walking. I am short of breath and my knee hurts and I feel 65. There is nothing wrong with me that I can’t fix with a tire pump, but I am not going to re-inflate the stroller tires in the middle of the walk to school. I encourage Mac to get out and walk and ask him to stop complaining about his shoes (threatening to bin them when we get home). At school I pull out the tire pump and attempt to fix the tires, only to find the pump is broken and now we have a truly flat tire. I carry Sailor halfway home. He is tired and dressed in a clown suit. He is cute and baby-like, but heavy. Another mom pushes the stroller halfway and then she splits off and I have to let Sailor walk.

It’s nice out. After school we should play but we are picking up my ex and going to a movie in the ‘burbs. It’s fun. We celebrate his birthday and Mac gets his first movie popcorn, which is fun to watch him eat. We stay out too late and I realize when we get home that I have forgotten to collect child support payment. My email and text messages go un-returned.

In Mac’s backpack is an envelope of books that he is apparently supposed to read and return in the fall. Can’t we read them tonight and bring them back on Monday? I ask him. “No,” he says, “They are to help me practice reading.” If there is one thing we have a lot of in this house (I mean besides shoes, clothes and toys) it is books. We certainly don’t need anyone else’s books cluttering up our space here and we don’t need to have any extra encouragement to read. We read every day. On closer inspection, it looks as if the envelope of books is meant to be kept. I’ll have to email Mrs. K, who finally gave up her email address to us this week becuz she has run out of paper!

Two days of school left. I am Sooooo in denial! And even as I know school is over on Tuesday, our summer schedule of activities officially begins with French camp on Wednesday afternoon! I love summer so much, so why am I so reluctant to see the school year end (for the first time since college)?!

Saturday night Mac reads to us. The Giving Tree. It takes nearly 30 minutes. I want to tell him to hurry up. I am tired. Highly frustrated. But I let him press on and I help him with the hard words. And now I understand why, as a child, I believed this to be a long book. It is a long book when read by a child. But my child is able to read it. And we are both simply amazed!

At breakfast Sunday morning Mac offers to make me a cup of tea. He does it quite well. Sailor requests coffee and Mac makes that as well. Oh the things my child has learned to do this year!

The children do some drawing:

S: That’s not Sally, that’s Emma.
M: Where’s Emma?
S: Emma’s not writed yet.

M: What’s that? A starfighter? A transformer? A ---?
S: It’s Emma!

In the afternoon we head out to the two art fairs in the neighborhood. We are without stroller. Sailor gets tired as we don’t leave til naptime. We are a mile away from home when he wants uppie and I have to give in. I can’t walk like this tho and we sit in a make-shift beer garden to watch a cover band for an hour. They are good. Mac uses a hand fan to whack two Frisbees – his drums. He occupies himself well. I am glued to my seat holding my baby, who is miraculously able to sleep through the earsplitting sounds of the band. I don’t get it.

Mac earns a buck helping out two women who ask him to pass two abandoned chairs over a rail for them. A buck! Cool!

During dinner Sailor colors himself green. He wants to be Yoda. I help. He can’t color his own face. Mac colors his feet. He does his own hands and arms. He looks like a mini-Hulk in a Yoda suit. Mac suits up in the Darth Vader costume. I reprimand them for using their kitchen mops as light sabers. And then I bring their light sabers down from the shelf in my closet.

“Watch in total silence as I slice off Yoda’s arm!” Mac commands us. Their battle is well-rehearsed. Or so it seems. Sailor as Yoda is very good at being killed.

His bathwater turns green.

At bedtime Sailor says, “Hey, I need to tell you something.” His signature line. He holds up Mac’s new book, Go Away, Dog and says, “I think I am reading this.”

I kiss him goodnight. He is very sweet tonight.
“How come you have an arm shirt like I do?” he inquires, referring to our pajama tank tops.
“Because it’s warm in here and I don’t want to get too hot,” I explain. He seems to switch subjects, “I love you in the morning when I get up and get dressed. That will be your surprise.” “I love you, too,” I tell him on my way out, after another kiss and hug. I am already two rooms away when he returns to the subject of our “arm shirts.”
“So overbody can see our muscles, right Mom?”
Right, Honey.

Mac comes out. “Can you come to my room for a minute?” he asks me to pick out his clothes for tomorrow. I kiss him and tell him that Aunt Minny’s friend, (visiting from Houston), said he was a very good boy – not a hard observation to make after witnessing Sailor’s screams all the way home because I could no longer tote his 34 pounds down the street. “Two people liked how you behaved today,” I mention the ladies who paid him at the fair. His face lights up. He is a good boy. When he wants to be. Which is most of the time.

Two more days of school. Then summer break. I am trying to feel optimistic. I should be, after all, summer is my favorite season. And we will have the freedom to do as we please for three months. Remember back in September? I ask myself. I was so reluctant to let Mac go to kindergarten. I didn’t want our summer of freedom to end. I didn’t want to do the every day thing. I didn’t want to relinquish my child to the big school. I didn’t want to admit he was growing up so quickly. I just wanted it to stay warm out so we could continue to trek to the beach and take long walks and eat dinner al fresco… I just wanted things to stay as they were. And now… I just want things to stay as they are. Right, I am trying to feel optimistic. But what I really feel, is heartbroken.