It’s football season

We use football season (and game weeks) as our family’s calendar sometimes. Like when Mallory, at 3-ish years old, told her teacher that FOOTBALL SEASON is the season that comes after summer. And the other night, when signing up for teacher conferences with Mallory’s kindergarten teacher – the other parents were asking “is that the week of Thanksgiving?” while my husband asked “is that Ohio State week?”

This year’s football season was a huge milestone for us to hit, because for months we’ve told Mallory that once football season starts, she would start kindergarten.

Michigan’s first game is tomorrow. That means kindergarten starts Tuesday.

I am AMAZED at how quickly we got here, and I look at my big girl and think there was no way she was ever as small as she is in the pictures from when she was a baby. Or when she turned one. Or two. Or three. Or even four.

She is our bright, beautiful brown-eyed girl, with curls she doesn’t usually love and fingernails she likes to chew. She still loves pink and dresses, but is actually choosing shorts and shirts more frequently now. She is VERY bossy (who knows where she got THAT from) – mostly with her brother, but she also loves on him a lot (like she wants to tuck him in his bed at night and read him a book).

And she’s going to kindergarten.

On Tuesday.

We had her open house this past Wednesday – we got to meet her teacher and see her classroom and find the bathroom and her locker and the cafeteria and the gym (twice…she is her father’s daughter) and the library. She will be taking the bus to and from school every day so we got a tag she has to wear for a few weeks so she (and the grown-ups) knows what to do after school. She has a good friend across the street who is starting first grade at Mallory’s school, and he informed his mom that he will sit next to Mallory on the bus and make sure she gets to her classroom.

I am preparing myself for tears – both mine & hers – and hope that her excitement about her first day helps her overcome her fears of the great unknown. I don’t know that she necessarily is afraid of new situations but I think there will be some general feelings of overwhelming-ness with regard to a big new school. She’s been the big fish in a little pond for almost 5 years, and she realizes that she won’t be in school with her old friends from preschool (with a school full of teachers who have loved her all these years) when she goes to kindergarten. That doesn’t seem to cause her any angst when we talk about it but starting at a new school, really only knowing one other friend who isn’t even in her grade, will be an adjustment, I’m sure. The principal of her new school & his wife are good friends of ours, and they have a kindergartener too – he & Mallory are in the same class. They’ve met a few times but it hasn’t really registered with Mallory that she “knows” him to the point where she’d consider him a friend. I wonder if we can do a crash course and throw the two of them in a room this weekend and make them become friends before Tuesday. (Kathryn, if you’re reading – let me know if we can borrow J for a few hours!)

I just hope that when I meet her at the bus stop that first day, and all the days after, that she has a huge grin on her face and is excited to tell me about her day and her new friends. And that she gives me a big hug and wipes away my tears.