Kindergarten!

Last night we went to "Meet the Teacher" and met Miranda's new teacher (it was originally scheduled for Monday night but got postponed.) We came away with a thick binder of paperwork we had to fill out. Only five years old, and already bringing home homework (well, for us, anyway.)

One of the forms we had to fill out was titled, "Introduce us to your child." One of the exercises on that sheet asked us to come up with five words to describe our child (examples included "Perfectionist" and "Cheerful".) Deciding we wanted our daughter to start off on the right foot, we decided to forgo such words as "neurotic" and "whiny", but, even so, it was not easy to come up with five words to describe her. The first word to come to mind was "Scientific" because she loves science ... but loving science does not necessarily make one scientific. Being "scientific" suggests a certain orderliness and thoroughness which Miranda may acquire over time, but hasn't quite achieved ... at this point, she is satisfied with her theory that any rock which is round and relatively smooth is a dinosaur egg, else it is a diamond in the rough. So we started with "imaginative" ... then "creative" ... "affectionate" ... and then we were stuck on the whole "loves science" thing again. We tried "curious", but weren't quite satisfied with that, then gave in and put down "Science-lover."

Scanning down, we saw there was another question: "What upsets your child?" Anything that upsets her plans ... of course! Miranda is a planner, and anything that upsets her plans really puts her nose out of joint. So we scratched out "curious" and added "planner" to that first question above.

Then, as if we needed to support our hypothesis that Miranda was first and foremost a planner, we got our proof this morning.

In an earlier posting, I mentioned that the bus schedule was wrong and we weren't sure where the closest bus stop was, so we've been practicing walking to the second closest bus stop to have the drill down on the first day of school. We knew all along that today we would run into people along the way who knew where that phantom bus stop was, but in the meantime it was all about timing.

Sure enough, as we headed down the street this morning, we came across some girls waiting with their dad for the bus. One of the girls was starting kindergarten, just like Miranda, and we tried to get Miranda to stop and say hello to the girl, but Miranda started flipping out. "But this isn't our bus stop!" she cried.

"Sure it is!" I said. "We were just going to that other bus stop for practice -- remember?"

"But this isn't our stop!" Miranda cried as she launched into a mini-meltdown because we weren't walking an additional quarter mile down the street according to plan. Luckily, we managed to distract her and order was restored to the world. In her defense, she was so excited about starting school today that she got up at 5:45, so we have to cut her some slack.

Anyway, she had a good day today, learned all about rules and manners. I think she will have a good year.