Graduation Week—a photo essay

Oh my God. I could never have imagined ‘graduating’ a Kindergartener could be this much work. Thankfully, I have literally turned the page on the calendar that contains most of the commitments from last week, and I’m in no hurry to revisit them.

Ooh, except in pictures. I’ll stroll down any memory lane that I’ve documented personally.

When The Boy started Kindergarten at the local kick-ass charter school a scant nine months ago, he couldn’t read—at all—and had washed out of his initial attempt at martial arts. He was not yet fully house-trained. He spun fanciful tales of the abilities his ‘super-powers’ granted him, which more worldly peers challenged him to prove, to his predictable embarrassment. Three-plus years of experience in daycare and preschool had somehow left him with almost zero social chops, at least with his peers.

Even before last weekend’s Kindergarten Campout, I couldn’t believe the change in our little future cultural warrior. As of today, he reads and solves math problems above his grade level, potties himself at night as necessary, his understanding of logic and systems impresses his teachers, is about a month away from earning his yellow belt, roughhouses comfortably and without complaint with his peers and reserves his most expansive flights of fancy solely for his art.

Could that really only have been one grade ago? And a grade I had formerly dismissed as “preschool with delusions of grandeur?”

If words contained calories, I’d be big as a house again.

Kindergarten proper got out at noon all year, but we also had The Boy signed up for the 3-hour daily afterschool arts program. It’s that group of kids who were there when I came around at the end of every day to drive him home, and it’s those kids I’ll think of when I recall The Boy’s Kindergarten year.

I am really going to miss those afterschool arts-program kids.

I made a point of picking The Boy up early the last week or so, and bringing my camera. The teacher noticed and asked me to get some less formal class photos of the whole class, which I was happy to do. Here is one of them:

I also got a few nice snaps of the afterschool arts program kids and teacher:

Most of the events of the week were less photo-worthy, involving lots of driving around and [MEMORY REDACTED]. Uh, and more driving in uncompromising Boise traffic then [ADDITIONAL PURGED MEMORIES].

I see flashes of trips to school and Taekwondo. Parent/teacher conferences. Ceremonies. Pre-ceremony ceremonies. Celebrations of the pre-ceremony ceremonies. Other peoples’ graduations including a few thousand at the local university, whose commencement activities my professor Missus was required to attend. Much scheduling hand-wringing and down-to-the-wire angst.

The Boy’s actual graduation ceremony was at this totally decent house on a hill with an amazing yard and a view that would have been breathtaking except for all the warehouse rooftops in the foreground.

The day was sunny and bright and the yard had a trampoline, a tire swing, a seesaw, all spread out over a capacious, green lawn… it was a kid’s fantasy playground, and a parent’s reminder of the abject financial failure our best career efforts represent.

But of course, being Americans, we think “some day we will live here” and are not the least bit envious.

Anyhow, every kid was recognized for some special personal achievement, no matter how hard they had to look to find one, including ours!

Ours was the only one however, who slapped his teacher five—hard—instead of shaking her hand upon receiving his ‘diploma.’ It was a total Taekwondo move and I was thrilled. He then recovered quickly and sheepishly offered her the handshake she had been been looking for.

Then it was more driving and suppressed memories until the dreaded Kindergarten Campout was upon us. We spent about as much as the average wedding dress costs for our overnight adventure (with the requisite oaths that our camping gear, unlike wedding dresses, would by God be used more than once) and headed for the hills.

Well, it turned out I really liked it [pause while reader recomposes him or herself], and more importantly, The Boy loved it.

The weather was perfect, the Coleman tent practically put itself up…

…and the tent on one side of us had a nurse in residence, and anything he couldn’t handle, the ninja in the tent on the other side was sure to be able to take care of.

The trees were just the right height

Not only for me, but for The Missus too

A bunch of us took a walk down to the river, where I got maybe my favorite photo of the weekend, of The Boy with his two favorite girls; his best friend from school and his Mommy:

The only fly in the ointment was this giant cliffside—the kids called it the dirt slide. But it was really just a cliff, about 5° off of being a straight vertical drop, that ran down into this ravine. And if you were walking the path, it just kind of comes along out of the blue. The first time I saw The Boy at the top of it took me by complete surprise. This is a kid who just last month balked at climbing a rock wall at the local Y, fully supervised and tethered to the nines.

But there he was, at the top of the cliff of death—across the chasm from me, completely out of my ability to intervene:

Clinging to some pitiful, scrubby plantlife in an attempt to climb up over the cliff of death instead of tumbling down it. Then, after what seemed like an eternity, he successfully accomplished that escape (all my autonomic functions began to whir to life again), and he decided that now he wanted to go down it!

So I spent the entire rest of the day shadowing him from just far enough away to race in and pick up the pieces if he should take a bad fall and I needed to sherpa him back to the nurse in the tent next door.

One of his peers, a kid with absolutely no fear at all and the agility and toughness that only little boys his age possess, insisted on running down the cliff-face. If I had been the only adult there, it wouldn’t have been responsible for me to capture it on video. Happily...

Yes, that’s my son assuring the crowd that it’s okay, his friend likes to get hurt.

Well, as long as he’s just misreporting the news and not making it himself, I won’t worry until he asks me to shoot his Fox News audition tape.

We got up in the morning, not very rested at all after an uncomfortable night’s sleep, had breakfast, went on a little family hike together...

...packed up our stuff in no time and drove the 40 miles back home. Shower. Nap. “Game of Thrones” season finale.

A surprisingly excellent weekend, one I find I actually would consider revisiting elements of, specifically the camping.

And who’d have guessed that it would have all hinged on an event that I originally dismissed as [MEMORY REDACTED].