Lovelihood

Yan Yan, piled high with chocolate cream, is one of those cutely packaged Japanese treats I grew up with, that can now be found in such exotic like the ethnic aisle of our neighborhood grocery and Target.

That school supply list called for a dozen glue sticks. The ones we found came in sets of eight. So we sent the requisite number to school and tossed the remainder into a drawer for our rainy day adhesive needs. Turns out occupying a toddler with a glue stick and a bag of shredded fabric scraps is a pretty easy thing.

All of my crafty spare time has been spent sweltering under a quilt while I stitch its layers together. So it was nice to sit at a coffee shop with a latte, donut and a managable swatch of sashiko, small enough to tuck into my purse. Gray thread on gray fabric. Going for more of a tonal, textural effect this time.

The seven-block walk from school offers up countless route possibilities, some more direct than others, all with sights heretofore undiscovered by us. Backyard chickens. All manner of grown edibles. Dahlias in the deepest burgundy shades. A Buddhist meditation center. Today's find was a toy soldier fire hydrant. Also spotted today on my solo walk out for some lunch was some Bill Gates-themed graffiti.

It doesn't get much more momentous than this. Because for precisely as long as we've been waiting for the day that we'd be sending our kid off to Kindergarten, for as long as we've entertained the very notion of having children, I've been waiting for the day when I'd be able to hand my summer-afflicted kid an ice cream cone, even watching it tumble sadly onto the sidewalk.  Five-plus years as a parent and that day didn't come until now with The Boy and his allergies off at school and Bear dictating her very own expedition at the zoo. She liked it.

The Boy's been pretty calm and nerve-free about this Kindergarten thing. And we convinced ourselves that bringing the camera and making a huge deal out of the first day (even if it is legitimately a huge deal) might jinx the whole deal and send him into a leg-clinging stupor. So we settled with a few poorly timed camera-phone shots and spent the rest of the day regretting not having the camera. But at the end of the day The Boy uncrumpled from his backpack a self portrait. With yellow hair. The caption, pre-printed at the bottom in Comic Sans: This is me on the first day of Kindergarten!

The Boy's school supply list was, at once, so small and so specific as to make the business of supply shopping, what should be a most holy, joyous occasion, to be kind of a bummer. Two erasers, a dozen glue sticks, the most basic of pencils, standard-issue markers, a ream of paper. Not exactly much to spark first-day-of-school excitement. Still, as I was packing up The Boy's bag this night, the last of his pre-school life, the smell of #2 Dixon Ticonderogas was an undeniable reminder that school is about to happen.