I can say with absolute certainty that we had no clue what it was that we were getting into when God saw fit to bless us with the amazing kid in Aylin Marie. With that, we also had no idea what we were about to experience with Kindergarten. We enrolled Aylin in a non-traditional schedule school, or year 'round schedule. So school for Aylin started earlier than others - August 1st. The first several weeks were tough on so many levels. Aylin took several weeks ( or maybe 7 or 8...) to settle in and stop the shenanigans. We didn't find out until days before school started that the bus service didn't run for the first 2 weeks and 1 day (until the normal school schedule started) so we had to quickly scramble and figure out alternate morning and afternoon arrangements to get our munchkin to and from school. Thanks to sweet friends who connected me to other new friends, family, and Jeff being flexible ( and his job allowing him to flex!) we made it through those first few weeks until the bus started running.
We dealt with several behavioral issues that really just took the rug out from under us. I've since heard from several other mom's that it's a pretty typical thing for kiddo's especially just starting out in Kindergarten to test those boundaries until they learn the ropes. But really, it was quite the punch in the gut to get 4 notes sent home within the first 3 weeks. Especially the one where we were told she kicked a class mate. When I attempted to get the back story and understand the situation I was even more disheartened when I gave her every possible escape to excuse the behavior away, only to find that there was no reason - she just kicked another kid just to kick them. Ugh. But after adjusting our "reward" system to more closely match what she was seeing at school (a clip up/down chart) and consequences at home for days where there was bad behavior at school we finally were able to dial things in and settle in to a good rhythm.
Jeff and I had our first parent teacher conference a few weeks ago (just before we hit our 2 week fall break) and were extremely pleased. The teacher echoed everything we were seeing already. She was encouraged and proud of how well Aylin was coming along after the first few tough weeks. We were pretty pleased at the beginning of the year when we found that Aylin's teacher has been a teacher since I (Teena) was in Kindergarten: 28 years! So this is not her first rodeo, and she clearly has a gift for working with children. But it was so nice to hear from her that she was proud of Aylin for working so hard and that she was seeing her making great strides in the behavioral department. It was also interesting to hear that (and according to Jeff he was the same way) that even though Aylin has a hard time sitting still, she's clearly paying attention and learning a lot. So the struggle has been more in helping her understand that when she's not sitting still, she's not being respectful to the people she should be listening to, and she's distracting her classmates. Her teacher mentioned that she often will call on her when they are in circle time and she's not sitting still in an attempt to catch her off guard, and she gets the answer right every time. It was also fun to hear (and see at home) how her reading is advancing. She's already at least a semester ahead on her teacher's expectation for where she should be. She loves to sound things out and write us beautiful little phonetically written notes All. The. Time. Anything and everything she can get her hands on she's trying to read. It's quite fun.
Walking to the bus has been an interesting adjustment. The bus is supposed to arrive at 6:58, it's a 1/4 mile walk from our house to the front of the neighborhood where the bus meets. So we (attempt) to leave the house by 6:50 to walk to the stop. So far (fingers crossed!!) we haven't missed the bus, even once! There was ONE time where the bus arrived early and we were only half way there when I realized it was OUR bus and not the middle schoolers bus that meets at the same location about 5 minutes before our bus arrives. But this day ours was running early and I freaked. We moved towards the center of the road and I made sure our flashlights were swinging so that hopefully he could see us amongst all the cars parked on the side of the road in the dark. So here we were just a-running down the middle of the road in the dark (but we had our flashlights!) trying to make it to the bus. He almost left, but then he did see us and waited for us to get there at our (slow) run. It wasn't until after she'd gotten on the bus and waved goodbye and blew me kisses that I looked at my phone to realize that even still it was 2-3 minutes before her usual pick up time. So far we've also been pretty lucky so that if it's raining Jeff can drive us down to the stop and we can wait in the car until the bus arrives so that we don't get soaked. There was only once when he had a coffee appointment with a friend in the early hours that it also happened to be raining that we had to make it to the bus stop on our own, and you know what? We survived!
We also had a super fun time at her first field trip to a pumpkin patch. The kids were ecstatic, and really well behaved. And almost a month later she's still spouting pumpkin facts (the life cycle of a pumpkin is..., this type of pumpkin is called... etc) I was tickled to be asked by another classroom mom if I would like to carpool with her and get to tag along on the field trip.
Kindergarten, it's a whole new world!