And Zen What

Yesterday was Six's birthday. He is 6.

I guess that makes it his Golden Blog Birthday. Anyway.

It was also his first day at his new school. The one with NO HOMEWORK. Yes, he's still in kindergarten, kinda--it's a progressive school and doesn't really do grades. At our local school he was to be enrolled in kindergarten again, and at the last possible moment I just couldn't do it to him. At the school Open House, he kept seeing all his "fwens" from last year visiting the first grade classrooms and saying, "I gonna be in firs' grade tomorrow, right Mom? Mom, MOM! Right?"

I'd explained it and explained it and explained it--that he was going to be in Mrs. Wonderful's class again (she really loves him, and she really is a wonderful, wonderful teacher), and even in BOTH her classes, morning and afternoon, and he'd get to do all the fun stuff twice instead of once and he'd learn everything so well and be so smart and blah blah blah. He did understand it. He just, well, didn't understand it.

Six is very sweet, very open, very very gregarious--and at the same time has an incredibly trigger-happy shame response. All kinds of things shame him that wouldn't phase other kids. That's just who he is. And while I kept telling myself that he could be manipulated, um, guided into seeing his return to K-garten as a Special Good Thing Just For Him, I guess I always knew, deep down, that that just wasn't going to work. Not with this kid.

So.

Yesterday, he had "Happy Birthday" sung to him by his homeroom. Kids of all ages, and some of their parents, hunkering down on and around soft benches and sit-upon cubes and such, in a remodeled house studded with art projects, reading lofts, a life size model of a spaceship (just the nose cone) which doubles as a class space, tanks full of fish and shark embryos and various ooky things. At some point during the morning, one of the directors asked him if he liked his new school.

His eyes got HUGE. His jaw dropped. (Six does incredulity like nobody I've ever seen; it's almost vaudevillean, but perfectly genuine.) Stunned, he yelled, "WHAT? DIS IS SCHOOL?????????" When she assured him that it was school indeed, he 'bout nodded his head off in answer, eyes still huge, jaw still dropped. She and a couple of the teachers were still chortling about it at pick-up time.

Happy Birthday Six!