Our oldest has started kindergarten! Things have been a bit crazy around here because of the holiday-shortened first week that coincided with all of heading to Michigan for my cousin’s wedding, plus another trip for my folks last week, but I still wanted to take a few moments and talk about this wild new ride we’re on.

After two years of attending an awesome nature-and-science-based preschool that she adored, I was a bit worried about how she would adjust to what I assumed would be a far more structured (and long) school day. As my mom pointed out, she’s rocking an 8 hour day between being picked up and dropped off by the bus!

So far everything seems to be working out well for our kiddo. Thanks to a few meetings that my wife and I have attended we get the feeling that she’s in good hands between the principal, her teacher and the teacher’s aid.

But, things got off to a semi-rocky start on the first day. My wife and I are both pretty prepared people. We’re big list-makers and do our best to never show up late, so we had both kids ready to roll out the door pretty early that Tuesday. We all walked up the long driveway and hung out at the driveway jog waiting for the bus to come. After about 10 minutes my wife started to get worried. I tried explaining that, even though we had a guestimate of a schedule, it was the first day and things might be all over the place for parents, kids and drivers alike.

Our house is on  relatively busy road, so we saw a lot of other buses going back and forth, but not one of them stopped for us. After I calmed my wife down, I took over and started worrying. At that point, I would have just thrown everyone in the car and driven over to the school (it’s only about 10-15 minutes away), but my wife wanted to wait a bit longer.

She called the school and we soon discovered that we’d been skipped or forgotten! We took it in stride and drove to school, thinking everything would be figured out by drop-off, even thinking that the driver would be extra keen on dropping her off and picking her up in the future because of this minor brain fart. Being the resilient kid she is, Lu got a bit annoyed, but didn’t let any of this overwhelm her.

And then we waited for her to get home and it took much longer than expected. Once again, we took turns worrying about where our first born was. Again, my wife freaked, then I freaked and finally we got a message from the school on our phones telling us the buses were delayed. Whew.

Since then, we’ve taken her out of school early for the wedding, she’s been successfully picked up and dropped off every other time and I’ve even gone to pick her up early so she can make it to dance class. She’s got a friend from another kindergarten class (there are four total!) on her bus and when I picked her up that one day, like ten kids all said goodbye to her as we walked by. I was a bit worried she might focus on just the one bus friend or maybe find herself in a situation where it’s harder to make friends, but luckily that was all just the mad ravings of a paranoid individual (me).

In other words, so far so good with this whole kindergarten thing!