Eeyore Goes to Kindergarten

As you can see, William is learning quite alot at kindergarten. He came home today with a lovely creation called "Life Cycle of a Butterfly", made of pasta. That project is exhibit A as to why I could never be a kindergarten teacher. I'm not nearly creative enough to come up with cute little projects like that. And it worked - William explained the basic lifecycle of a butterfly to a T.

I wish I could say that he's enjoying kindergarten more. He's struggling a bit with his transition. The first full week of school found him practically in tears as he got on the bus because he was going to miss me so much (his words). He was jealous of Tessa because she got to stay home with me more. He pretended that I was there to make himself feel better. Sigh. Its a good thing that he had two years of preschool; I shudder to think of the transition if this was his first experience away from me. I tried to explain that, if you count school (4 hours door to door) and sleeping (11 hours), we still have a whopping 9 hours to spend together every day. It is apparently not enough for William, the homebody.

I think he does OK once he's there. But it's hard to tell. We give him lots and lots and lots of positive reinforcement, but it's hard. He whines about homework. He doesn't like practicing his writing because "I'm not good at it" and "it's hard". The week after next I'll actually be volunteering in his classroom on Tuesday afternoons and I'll be interested to see how he interacts with everyone. I'm guessing he enjoys himself more than he lets on.

This is all new to us, because Henry was Mr. Gung-ho about school from day one. He has, on more than one occasion, cried when he had to stay home from school due to illness. He enjoys school and always has. So I'm not sure what to say to William when he says, "I don't think I want to go to school today." I usually mutter something about how school is what you do when you are a big kid and it's like his job and sometimes we have to do things that we aren't excited about but we do them anyway and school is SO MUCH FUN! Hopefully it will start to sink in. Soon. Someone please say it'll be soon.

On a positive note, Tessa seems to be (and I hesitate to say it because I really don't want to jinx it) potty trained. She hasn't had an accident in quite a while and is in underwear full time, even when we leave the house. She tells us when she needs to go and insists on going by herself, which is a nice change from our little Eeyore, who insisted on having company for months after he learned how to do his business like a big boy. She is even waking up dry most mornings but I still have two packages of princess pullups so I imagine we'll keep her in her "nighttime underwear" for a bit longer, just to avoid accidents. But she's doing great! And we're glad and so proud of her. I guess girls really are easier to potty train. Thank goodness. I don't think I had another months-long saga of accidents and tears in me.