The Watson's Great Adventure: Pre-School Photo Shoot, Preschool and the long drawn out Kindergarten start!

Since Matthew got to go school supply shopping and backpack shopping with Amma and Papa in early August we've spent the past few weeks working on routines to get ready for school, which I'll get into in another post because truthfully it was bogging down this post. Living in a college town with a rapidly expanding university, I'm soooo thankful we did all our back to school shopping super early as thinking about going to Target the past few weeks gives me the heebie jeebies.

Our schools do a lot to get kids ready for Kindergarten, almost to the confusion of poor Kindergarteners! Everyone is eager to ask Matthew when school starts, but between meet and greets, orientations, family meetings etc. it's kinda hard to answer! However, his first full day will be Friday (tomorrow) morning. He's ready and I think I'm ready. Catherine doesn't start preschool until Tuesday so I'm very curious how she'll respond on Friday/Monday. I'll be doing the same preschool co-op curriculum with Catherine that we did with Matthew, though our class this year will include 7 kids! Once we make it through the Kindergarten start we are very excited to be starting preschool again. I'll be teaching first to build up my "maternity leave" so our living room looks like a preschool exploded in it.

First in the lead up to Kindergarten was the Meet and Greet where we spent about half an hour exploring the classroom, checking out the new school greenhouse and in general getting acquainted with it all. To be fair, there was another awkward "first" meet and greet last spring for the Kindergarteners. I may or may not have become overwhelmed with all my memories of social awkwardness through school years and projected those into my worries for Matthew. If having to watch my baby navigate this awkward arrangement wasn't enough, on top of it all I now realize I was having an emotional breakdown about the fact I'm not teaching anymore and this was the first time in a long time I'd been in an elementary school where I didn't have my own classroom. So, all things combined I totally lost my cool last spring and had to excuse myself to the bathroom to ugly cry.

In retrospect I'm glad I got it out of my system there and this past week's meet and greet went better. Matthew's teacher is super nice, it was nice to see the classroom and because of better planning/advertising the event was attended by a larger cohort of people and there was more opportunity for the kids to really get a sense of the school. I managed to keep my cool and keep my tears in until we were headed home and the kiddos did this and started reassuring each other about how much fun the other would have at school:

They can be so sweet sometimes. Next up was an orientation afternoon. This was a little longer exposure to the classroom, piles of forms to fill out, and a nice tour for the adults and kids. To say Matthew is obsessed with Legos is an understatement, so when we came back from filling out forms it was no surprise he was at the lego bin:

His first "assignment" during orientation:

And walking home with Daddy:

Orientation went really well. As I expected/feared, Matthew is definitely the absolute youngest in the class and though we've gone back and forth about "red shirting" him, he seems ready and on par with his peers.

To celebrate going back to school and my new camera repair and lense (Thanks again Mom and Dad! Sorry it took me so long to get the lense figured out!), we took to the backyard for a quick back to school photo shoot. I'm sure I'll want to take pics tomorrow, but I wanted to get some pictures of the kiddos at this stage.