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.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 5:47 am and is filed under Family Tree. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.