A few weeks ago, J was “Star Student” of his kindergarten class. This coveted position involves showcasing treasured possessions from home, sharing pictures of friends and family, and having the teacher read your favorite book to the class. Friday culminates with classmates gifting the Star Student a book of adorably clunky kindergarten illustrations inspired by the Star Student him/herself.
Dave and I excitedly opened J’s book with him on Friday evening.
“Oh my gosh, how sweet is this?!” I said. “Look! There you are wearing blue, your favorite color. And you love Legos! And I see ice cream, and a pineapple, and a burger… this is such a nice drawing from so-and-so.”
“Ha!” Dave and I laughed at page 2. “McDonald’s burger and fry! So-and-so has your number.”
By the time we got to page 3, an illustration of literally nothing except McDonald’s fries, we got suspicious. “J, did you tell your class we eat a lot of McDonald’s or something?”
“No, I didn’t.”
Well, you can probably guess how the majority of the rest of the pages of his Star Student book looked.
J insists he did not tell his class he likes McDonald’s, nor that we eat a lot of McDonald’s, nor that he mentioned McDonald’s at all. I proceeded to ask his classmate at the bus stop the following Monday. She confirmed there was no mention of J having an unusually high inclination for fast food known to be almost entirely nutritionally void.
I am therefore equal parts mystified as to what the muse was behind this clear trend of McDonald’s, and expecting that our final parent-teacher conference this year will include a surprise discussion around the importance of healthy habits in child nutrition.
Our bedtime routine for the older 2 boys consists of a few books, a few songs, and sometimes a story. I started the storytelling portion a couple of years ago as inspired by my uncle, who told epic tales about my siblings, me, and my cousins — and I do mean “epic” as I only found out later that he lifted a lot of his material from classics like the Odyssey or Iliad. The trick to storytelling is that they have to close their eyes to imagine the story, peppered with all the references that allude to their interests du jour. Before you know it, they’re sleeping soundly.
But as the boys have gotten older and a bit bossier with their requests for story content (“make the bad guy a giant!” “say that we’re traveling up a volcano this time!” “pretend that C has super strength and can defeat the monster in one punch!”), Dave has started to troll them a little bit during his nights putting them to bed.
Take, for instance, J’s fascination with dragons for the past few months. He requested stories about the brothers as dragons, and we obliged. But then he started requesting that his dragon self had multiple powers: fire and water. Or fire and water and ice. And eventually, without shame, he asked that Dave tell the story with J featured as an Everything Dragon. As in, everything power. As in, totally OP* and does not make for much of a contested battle scene at the story’s climax.
So Dave obliged and started telling stories about J as an Everything Dragon. But in the stories, the attack scenes were riddled with mentions of poppy seeds flying, or sesame seeds scattering around, or J getting soggy and crumbly from the rain. The big reveal finally happened: J was actually an Everything *Bagel* Dragon.
This happened subtly at first, but then in enough stories that eventually I could hear J explicitly request during story time: “Dad, can you tell me a story where I’m an everything dragon? But not the bagel kind.”
In the 90 – 120 minute saga that is bedtime in our house, I have to say, me loitering in the hall to eavesdrop on the hilarity of Dave trolling the boys with these types of things is probably not the material that would get us featured on Parents magazine, but it is definitely how I just spent my Friday night.
*overpowered/gamer-speak
4 boys, 4 anecdotes that perfectly describe their respective dominant personality traits. See if you can guess who is who: J, O, A, or C.
1: this bro innately prefers all things off-brand: Donald over Mickey, Luigi over Mario, even secondary colors like green over primary blue.
2: this bro is the “domino that won’t fall” according to his teachers. When the entirety of his class successively wakes from nap-time cranky or crying, he is – without fail – smiley and content.
3: this bro is a living study in developmental conflicts between impulse, logic, and responsibility. Immediately following losing his temper with a friend, he will be receptive to conversations around empathy for his friend, and then – completely of his own volition – run over to said friend’s house to apologize in person for his actions.
4: this bro comes home with the following note from his teacher — after a class assignment that would have been counted complete if all he had done was simply scribble a few lines using the crayon of his choice.
Answers: (1) O (2) C (3) J (4) A (of course).
Is there any amount of context that could make these make sense?
*****
J: if I ever get a hippo, I’m naming it Kel.
January 2022, 6 years old
*****
Me, shouting from the upstairs hallway, at 7am: is this an empty bag of hot dogs?? Boys, where did all the uncooked hot dogs go??
*****
Dave: is this how you always imagined motherhood would be?
Me: honestly, I grossly underestimated the amount Scatman would be involved.
Dave & I have a running document of the absurd or comical things said in the company of our kids (frankly, either by them or by us).
Some favorites from J:
*****
(Birthday included treats at school, water play, and a live musician, plus we picked J up early to go to the park’s splash pad/playground/beach AND had neighbors over for cake)
Gigi: happy birthday, J! What did you do today??
J: I got sunscreen in my eyes.
June 2019, 4 years old
*****
Me: don’t forget to wash your armpit.
J: yep, and my legpit. *Scrubbing behind his knee*
July 2020, 5 years old
*****
Me: Ohh, J. You’re so wonderful. I’m so glad you’re mine. I mean, I’m so glad I grew you. Haha! I mean, you grew yourself, but I provided the uterus. We make a pretty good team, you & I.
J (after a few seconds, thoughtfully): Although… you did grow a baby who likes to eat his own boogers.
March 2021, 5 years old
*****
(Walking to the bus stop)
J: pretend we’re strangers.
Me: okay. Hi, I’m Kel; what’s your name?
J: no, I mean, pretend we’re strangers who live in different houses but we’re best friends.
Me: oh, okay. Oh hey, J! How’s your morning going?? Haven’t seen you.
J: hi. (Pause) okay, now pretend we’re volcanoes.
April 2021, 5 years old
*****
Today’s addition:
Me: boys, this is the second mini-flashlight we’ve found tucked into C’s sleepers today already. Do not put things in his clothes.
J: that’s not a flashlight, Mom. Those are C’s boosters.
December 2021, 6 years old
I regularly get comments about how the boys are “clones” of Dave. It’s not that I’m against that notion; after all, I like Dave well enough to marry him, so the idea that my sons take after him is definitely not a bad thing.
That said, I do feel as though I am grasping at straws sometimes to identify ways they are also like me. So far the list includes: O has my more adventurous dining palate, the 3 older boys have my blue eyes, and all 4 of us behave like small children with poor executive function when we’re frustrated by something inconsequential and inanimate.
However! We can add one more to the list today:
Around 6:15, J appeared next to my bed, and his proximity to my face woke me up in a quasi-startling fashion. Mind you: I have not slept a night through in many weeks now, so the idea of having my sleep interrupted by anyone other than the infant relying on me for sustenance is… pretty offensive. Fortunately for J, in my sleepy stupor, I was too tired to react other than to mutter some question about what he was doing.
J (softly): Mom, I just saw the most beautiful sunrise.
Me (shameless sucker for a sunrise): you did?
J: yeah, it was orange and yellow. It was so beautiful, Mom.
Normally this would be the moment where I’d jump out of bed and head outside to view it myself. But I repeat: it has been weeks of interrupted sleep. I did a quick mental calculation: I know the saying that “tomorrow is never promised” and therefore I should “seize the day” and behold the beauty of the sunrise. But if for some reason the apocalypse happens and there is, in fact, no sunrise tomorrow, the extra sleep in the wee hours of this morning will surely serve me better than a memorable vista.
Instead, I unlocked my phone and mumbled a request for J to take a picture for me.
He came back shortly afterwards with 2 shots of the sunrise: one “through the shades” and one “through the window.”
He may walk like his dad, talk like his dad, and certainly have a penchant for mental math like his dad, but that uncontainable excitement and appreciation for a sunrise hours before it’s polite to rouse anyone else in the house?? That is all me.
“party in the rain”
(from the same kids who starred in
“pandemic school year”)
This is a screenshot of my calendar from September 2020. It was J’s 3rd week of Junior Kindergarten, fully remote. They switched to a “hybrid” (4 days in-person, 1 day remote) model mid-October… which was followed by us having to quarantine for a COVID case on J’s bus, which turned into the entire district shutting down for two weeks, which turned into 6 weeks, which turned into “through the holidays and part of January just to be safe as we expect another surge,” which turned into “you can come back to hybrid but seriously please keep your home work space ready in case we need to bail out at any moment,” which carried us through the rest of the year. Ah, memories.
Back to the calendar: blue are my work meetings, pink is our family calendar, and brown are J’s class times. Classes involved whole group sessions, small group “cohorts” that alternated times depending on the day, live participation (read: paying attention and coming off mute to answer questions), homework to reinforce lessons, specials (music/PE/art), and the encouragement to have “purposeful play” (as in, no screens) in between. As you can visually deduce, the frequent and short class segments were perfectly tailored to the kids’ attention spans, and horrifically tailored to the kids’ working parents’ schedules.
This morning, after an entire academic year spent making it work with whatever was the expectation du jour — and, let’s be real, with some genuinely epic failures therein — J dialed out of his last remote class of the year.
I was surprised by how sentimental I got as he hung up on his class for (hopefully!) the last time. I’ve had my eyes affixed to this coming Friday as his last official day, but on the other hand, the remote classes are so symbolic of the absurdity of this, our first academic year as parents. Dave & I still have no idea what the layout of the Junior Kindergarten classroom really looks like except that J used to sit at the “purple hexagon” table and then moved to “orange triangle.” We have never set foot in the music room or the gym, and have only a vague sense of the playground sections designated to 1 group per day to reduce cross-contamination of classes. We can only imagine the state of his locker and how many belongings of his have grown comfortable in their home at his school’s Lost-&-Found.
But as with so many things since March 2020, there is some silver lining to the strangeness. In the case of Junior Kindergarten and these standing remote learning days, I’ve had a full year of unusual access to my son’s education, development, and relationships, witnessing the following:
- Our 5 year old demonstrating better VC etiquette than 90% of the adults I know, able to toggle between tabs, ‘pin’ screens to get closer visuals of the materials being reviewed, begin to troubleshoot tech issues like dropped connections, and, most importantly, transition from the level of nerves he had on his first day (hiding under his desk) to being a reluctant, then active, then eager participant, with progress and friendships and literacy to show for it.
- The astounding thoughtfulness of his teacher’s lesson planning, even with such little kids, even in such a bizarre setting… stories about virtual school, becoming “mask ninjas” in preparation for returning to in-person learning, and seasonally-tailored activities (such as practicing how to independently dress oneself for outdoor play in the snowy months — in order: pants, boots, coat, hat, gloves — set to the tune of “head, shoulders, knees, and toes”).
- A level of familiarity with the kids in the class that I would never be privy to otherwise, which has in turn facilitated far more robust color commentary from J over time… I know, for instance, that Logan is the fastest kid in class (which is saying something given that J considers himself akin to “the Flash”), that Emerson has a pet fish named “Prince,” and that Isaac will, without fail, find a dinosaur-related artifact to satisfy any show-&-tell prompt.
To commemorate the end of this chapter, I want to highlight 3 people without whom Dave and I would surely not be able to look back on this experience as fondly:
- My manager, whom I will never be able to thank enough for the trust and air cover he provided me during this segment of my career where work/life felt relentlessly zero-sum.
- J’s teacher, who not only handled the academic year’s challenges with poise and quick pivots, but also unwittingly taught me so much about how to effectively lead and interact with small children.
- Jack Hartmann, who I had never heard of before September, would not assume would be a good candidate for kids’ entertainment, yet without question has the best days of the week song on the web (see Days of the Week Rap Back) — a highly informed opinion after comparing many (so, so, so many) other days of the week songs over the course of the year.
