Adventures in Kindergarten

Well it’s official, my baby has started Kindergarten, and I have officially experienced my first drop-off/pick-up loop. For years I have learned how to successfully avoid school zone areas because of the traffic, and now I am that traffic. For the first day we left the house almost 30 minutes before the start of class knowing we’re less than a mile away from the school. What we hadn’t taken into consideration: other parents who live in the neighborhood lol. So we immediately got stuck in traffic outside our community and then again in front of the school. To top things off the school has a new system for checking in with your ID, and there was a huge long line to get in. Fortunately my husband was with us so he was able to drop us off and find a place to park and wait while I waited with our son in the line to get in. He was almost 30 minutes late to class because of how long the line was! But he got there and he had a great day.

Pick-up was slightly less dramatic, but I seriously don’t understand the parents who show up an hour early for pick up and just wait in their car making traffic. Don’t they worry about how much gas they are wasting? Like it’s $5 just to idle my dude. I found a space to park and debated waiting in my car since I was like 10 minutes early, but there was already a line so I joined it (it wrapped around the building) and struck up a conversation with an abuela who didn’t know what she was doing either lol. Immediately in the car ride home he was asking to go back to Kindergarten all day tomorrow. And then this morning when I woke him up early (to get ready early, to leave early) I told him he was going to Kindergarten and he didn’t even fight about turning on the TV. Amazing.

This morning’s drop-off was much easier. We left the house a good 20 minutes earlier today and while there were already cars waiting in the loop, there were also parking spaces available, which gives me hope when it’s my turn to do a solo drop-off next week. I’ve actually been pretty nervous about this because I don’t like being in high-traffic situations but now that I’ve seen the flow of things I think I’ll be fine. It’s like a whole new chapter of adulting, being a parent of a school-aged child. Check-in to get on campus went a lot smoother, too, which was a blessing.

Also a blessing? The weather! We are in our first of many days under 100 degrees (F) which means we’ll be able to go play at the park without roasting under the sun. (It also means that el nino is on the way but that’s a post for another day lol).