First Day of School - K5

As hard as it is to believe, Emma is in kindergarten. Shocking! Where have the last 5 years gone? She is in a "developmental kindergarten" at Buena Vista Elementary. Her class is made up of 11 boys and 1 girl (that would be Emma) - half are in kindergarten and half are in first grade. All have some sort of developmental delays and are not really ready for "regular" kindergarten. Emma's teacher is young and excited, which makes us very happy. The aids are not quite as young and have lots of experience, which also makes us very happy!! It's a perfect mix!

As far as I can tell, Emma enjoyed her first day. School is an extremely stimulating place - lots of noise, lots of people and lots of things that she prefers not to deal with. Her coping mechanism for those situations is to escape them if possible and ignore them if not. She barely said a word to me for an hour after we got home and she is just now starting to act "normal" as opposed to withdrawn. I think it will take a while for her to get acclimated and not feel so overwhelmed by the whole experience. Since this is actually our 3rd full year of school, and our 4th "first day of school" in her young life, I'm not particularly surprised by her reactions and was pretty much prepared for this.

Side note - I just had to chase her out of our bathroom where she had pulled out a drawer and dumped it all over the floor - I think she's back to normal!

We are hoping that she'll be settled into her school routine before James arrives - we'd like to keep the "new" things in her life to one at a time instead of all at once. Of course, we have no control over this, so we'll just see how it turns out!