My daughter started climbing when she was still small enough for a bassinet, forcing us to retire her co-sleeper months before she outgrew it.

She was the first in her class to be able to swing across the monkey bars and these days she scrambles up any pole that looks tall enough to get her off the ground.

She can’t skip, though.

That’s what stuck with me after we discussed kindergarten-readiness with her preschool teacher. Her teachers have prepared her well. She knows the alphabet, can sometimes count to 100 and can recognize a few simple words.

She hasn’t quite mastered handwriting, but she can type her name on the computer. (That’s got to be a genetic thing.)

She can hopscotch, but she can’t jump rope.

In other words, she’s pretty much ready to go into the big kid world of elementary school, where early bedtimes will take the place of afternoon naps and breakfast comes before the school day begins.

She’s so excited about her upcoming graduation ceremony and party at Chuck E. Cheese that she doesn’t realize that it also means saying goodbye to the friends she’s known since she was a toddler and leaving the school grounds where Uncle John guards the gate and keeps the kids safe inside.

Since she’s joining her brother at his school, she already explored just about every kindergarten classroom without realizing that soon she’s going to be spending five days a week in one of them.

She won’t be going into a strange new world, but she’ll be going it alone.

That’s the problem with preschool.

My daughter’s is walking distance from my office, city hall, the courts, the state Capitol and the downtown business district.
It’s not walking distance from many homes, though, so my daughter’s classmates will scatter across the island when they leave in the next couple months.

I don’t think my daughter grasps that the kids she’s preparing for kindergarten with aren’t the kids she’ll be attending kindergarten with.

I know she’ll survive.

I bet she’ll even learn to skip.

I just hope that she’s picked up a skill that her teachers can’t necessarily test her for: the ability to make friends.

She might need some to help her turn a jump rope.

As I walked through Costco yesterday, I couldn’t help wishing that I was the mom in charge of paper goods.

Instead, I’m the mom who forgot to stake out a specialty for the fundraiser tomorrow and got reminder via phone from her son at 2:30 p.m.

By that point, the only things left to sign up for were hot dogs and Spam musubi.

“We’ll do hot dogs,” I told him quickly before someone else snapped them up and I was stuck making musubis all night.

As we drove to Costco, I asked my son how many he needed.

“Fifty?” he suggested with a shrug.

“FIFTY?”

“Uh, 25?”

It turns out that you can buy hot dogs in a 50 pack at Costco for less than $7. But, as in all hot dog related issues, you can only buy the buns in packs of 24.

“Do you want 22 extra buns or do you want two extra hot dogs?” I asked my son.

As I reached for more buns, he stopped me. “It’s okay,” he said. “We’re not the only ones.”

In the end, it turns out that the prospect of making 50 hot dogs before 7 a.m. was more daunting than the reality of it.

Still, it wasn’t as simple as paper plates.

When my daughter took portraits a few weeks ago, I let her wear a strand of pearls.

I didn’t tell her that I allowed it in honor of my Grandma Pearl, who passed away last fall.

I just told her to be careful with them and, if she was, we’d make a tradition out of letting her wear them every portrait day until she turned 18, when she could keep them for herself.

These were pearls that my mother had given me, not the pearls I’d been given to remember my grandmother. Those are mine for life.

This Memorial Day, I can’t help but think of my grandmother and one thing that’s always struck me is that the biggest “complaint” about her is that she was a neat-freak, which is only a problem because the neatness gene wasn’t passed along to her granddaughter.

I’m thinking of my Uncle Henry, too, who, unlike my grandmother, was a hoarder, and I can’t help but smile when I think of many unexpected finds my other relatives have made as they’ve cleaned out his home in Los Angeles.

It all makes me wonder what stories my kids are going to tell about me. Hopefully, I’ll have many years ahead of me to create a legacy so they won’t remember me as the shrill, short-tempered mom, who loves them to excess and isn’t particularly tolerant when they don’t show her the same reverence.

Are they going to remember me as the woman who worked her schedule around school, enrichment and tutoring sessions, only to end up working late into the night when there were books to be read and movies to cuddle up in front of? Will I be the mom who just said, “Wait!”?

Are they going to recall that I worked hard to earn enough to provide for their needs and some extras, besides, or are they just going to remember all the times I said no, or claimed poverty when I couldn’t be indulgent?

My four-year-old likes to “remember.” She often “remembers” the time I never showed up to pick her up from her father’s house. Someday, she’ll realize that I obviously showed up, since she’s been able to blame me for abandoning her again and again and again.

I don’t even want to speculate about what my 11-year-old REALLY thinks about me. He’s at the point where he needs to become a parent himself before he can understand that some of the things I’ve done out of love, not because I wanted to cause him endless misery.

Luckily this Memorial Day isn’t about me, though, so I can turn my thoughts to better people.

Memorial Day is right around the corner and I haven’t made any summer plans.

Well, I know what I’m doing. I’m working.

My daughter is finishing up preschool and heading straight into kindergarten without taking a breath.

My son? Well, he’s turning 12 and…

It used to be easy. I’d moan about having to drop a ridiculous amount of money on day camp, then rest easy as my son was taken care of for the summer.

Day camp is cool when you’re 6. It’s okay when you’re 7 or 8. Apparently, about the time you start approaching double-digits, though, you start realizing it’s just glorified babysitting.

A couple years ago, my son thwarted my efforts to get him to tolerate one more summer with “the kids” and — after I’d already paid in advance — he convinced his grandfather to let him come over every day. The waste of hundreds of dollars plus the stress of getting from town to Kailua and then back to town by 8 a.m. did me in.

Every year since, we’ve managed to figure out something that was okay, but not ideal.

When it came to trying to figure out what to do this summer, my son and I couldn’t agree on the perfect solution, and, as I mentioned earlier, all of a sudden, it’s just about a week before summer vacation and I’ve got nothing lined up for the kid but a summer writing program that will occupy him for two hours a day for exactly one week.

Maybe he’ll end up with a true “break” this summer.

I’m trying to figure out why these days that seems like such an alien concept.

Lately, I’ve been less inclined to jump in the car just because I’m feeling restless, but otherwise I haven’t changed my driving habits much.

When you’re required to have a car for work, it’s hard to be a good citizen and catch the bus, as much as I’d relish sitting wiih a book in my hands instead of a steering wheel.

Today, I got almost all the way to work when I realized I’d forgotten my laptop. Another day, I might have been able to work around it, but not today.

Normally, in a situation like this I’d mourn the loss of time. Today, I was more saddened by the waste of gas.

On my way back, I decided it’s time to figure out some gas saving measures… beyond making sure I have everything with me when I leave.