First Day of Kindergarten

Jude had a really great first day of Kindergarten... right up until it was time to actually do school.

We did our usual Monday morning run to Etown to visit the Chiropractor, and then I dropped him off at Renee's house to play while I did my grocery shopping. Renee does therapy with Jude four mornings a week. Three of those mornings are at our house, but on Mondays he gets to play at her house. 

Jude has quickly gotten used to Chiropractor visits and does really well there, and he loves going to Renee's house.

After lunch, it was time to start our school. I've planned to spend about two hours in the afternoons working on school with him, with a potty break in the middle. Two hours may not seem like very long, but it's intense, one-on-one, non-stop school work. When he went to preschool last year at the public school, he was there for four hours and I figured up that he got less than 30 minutes of actual instructional time. And when you add the three hours he spends in one-on-one therapy every day, we're more than satisfied with his "course load" for Kindy. We've taken a break this summer, but in the spring we were doing school work for an hour at a time and he loved it. 

I took the above picture to compare with his first day of preschool picture from last year, but I also wanted to start a fun new tradition in front of our lockers:

About the t-shirt: Let me tell you a story about a little girl about 25 years ago who had a Batman t-shirt that she loved. Said little girl really wanted to wear her Batman t-shirt on her first day of Kindergarten, but her mama (understandably) wanted her to dress a little cuter than that for the first day. When she got to Kindergarten, half of the class had on Batman t-shirts! So when that little girl grew up and saw this Batman t-shirt, she knew exactly what her son was going to wear for his first day. It's the cirrrrrrrcle of liiiiiiiiiiiife! (Please don't think that I was somehow scarred or affected by this event. I only know this story because my mom told it to me. I don't even remember it happening. But my mom has never forgotten it! Jude's shirt was as much for her as it was for me.)

His first day of school was ROUGH. He yelled/cried through the whole thing. (If you've been around him much, you probably know what I mean when I talk about his yell/cry. It's a loud AAAAAAHHHHHH that basically means, "I don't like this." The good news was that he still did everything I wanted him to do, even though he was yelling/crying the whole time. He's great like that.

I can't end things there, though. I have to add that the second day of school was a million times better. He didn't yell/cry even once, and he actually seemed to enjoy the activities. So please don't worry that I'm just torturing him and/or myself with all of this. I'm sure not every day will be awesome, but I'm also sure that not every day will be like the first day.