In less than two weeks our daughter will finish her first year of school. She will no longer be a kindergartner. She will be moving into the first grade.
Caelyn's kindergarten graduation is set for next Wednesday with the last day of school next Thursday. It's funny. Before I had a child in school, I found the idea of all the little graduation celebrations amusing. I didn't really see them as having much of a point. Not anymore. They are significant, at least for a kindergartner.
I hear the transition from kindergarten to first grade is one of the toughest. For the first time they have to sit in desks rather than around tables. The teaching styles are different and the work is harder. It may be only one grade difference but it is two different worlds.
As is often the case with time, this school year has seemed to both fly and crawl by simultaneously. It feels as if it were only yesterday I was holding Caelyn's hand, walking her to class on her first day of "real" school.
That day was hard on me. I was proud but sad. It was her first significant step into a bigger world that I would not always be a part of. There would be influences I would have no control over and friends I would barely know. It would be a world that was hers. Sure, I would be a part of it, but it would be hers and I would be the visitor.
Fortunately, that world has been a good one. She has been blessed with wonderful teachers and classmates. She has made some really good friends and has learned a lot.
Now with summer coming, the onus will be on me to make sure the relationships she has forged through this school year continue.
One of the saddest things it seems to me is to see the relationships built up over the course of a school year disappear, or at least go on hiatus, during the summer. I know from my own experience that is tough on a kid. You go from seeing your friends almost every day to not seeing them at all very abruptly.
It's no one's fault really. Time doesn't stop and the day to day activities of life keep coming so before you know it, summer is over and your kid hasn't seen their friends for two months. It happens to us adults all the time.
So there will need to be play dates. Hopefully, a lot of play dates. I need to make sure of that. There is also Caelyn's birthday at the beginning of August to plan. Hopefully, many of her classmates will be in town for that.
This monkey will need to do some dancing this summer to keep the kids entertained. And I hope to have my kids and their friends dancing along with me.
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