When preschool started, I stood at the Duster in my pony tails, and made it clear to Daddio that I wasn’t going.  NO SIR-EE.  I may look gorgeous in my patchwork lime green overalls with bright red shoes and white knee socks, and let’s not even get started on my fabulous hair…I didn’t care.  I wasn’t going.  And here’s the thing: I was NEVER going.  I did not attend orientation, do a great job cutting out my paper apple nametag, pick up a black pen, and effortlessly write my name.  I’m not even sure I knew my name.  I didn’t happily participate through all of orientation, come home and wear my backpack proudly, talking on and on to total strangers about how much I was looking forward to Pre-K.  I made no such pretenses.

I did not, on the morning of Pre-K, wake up in a stunned silence, refuse to eat breakfast, insist on changing out of the scratchy dress that I begged to wear, and then experience a wild case of diarrhea.  I was not so upset, that I had an accident in my Dad’s car on the way to school, and he had to climb out in a suit in traffic, downtown, take me and my older sister in Walgreen’s, and then try to change me into a back up outfit while I threw a huge tantrum about how ugly the back up outfit was.  To be fair, that might be because there is no way my back up outfit was as ugly as the green highwater overalls.  My Mom didn’t have to call the teachers in advance to give them a head’s up that I was a basket case.  I’ve always been a basket case.  I don’t pick and choose “when”, unless by “when”, you mean “always”. I’m CONSISTENT.

I did not cry so hard in the cafeteria that my sister could hear me from the hallway, and then she spent her lunch hugging me (however, I did pull that stunt at Vacation Bible School more than once).  I did not freak the freak out at the end of the day when I lost my favorite stuffed animal, swear it was gone forever, while my sister found it in the play kitchen.

Nope, I swore I wasn’t going, arrived, cried my eyes out, got into a fight with a kid named Jamie over a play telephone, and whopped him in the head with it.  That one sentence is the sum total of my Pre-K experience.  The story above belongs to THIS GIRL:

If you have time to drop a little prayer for a tiny blondie who seems to think she’ll be interviewing with Ivy League colleges during Pre-K, I’d appreciate it.  She seemed convinced by my lecture tonight that Pre-K is little more than play and scissoring, but I know she’s hiding something.  She’s scared out of her mind in a hallway she’s inhabited before she could walk.  She’s known her teachers since before she had MEMORY.  This poor cutie is spooked.  Spooked in a room covered in her favorite Dr. Seuss characters.  In a room filled with kids she already knows, and a day stacked with activities she loves.  We have no idea what’s gotten into her, so warm thoughts for a better Friday are much appreciated.