Shopping for Schools

Yesterday, we started shopping for kindergarten.

Kindergarten! Can you believe?

The shopping is all very traumatic and emotional and exhilarating and depressing. Partly because my child will go to kindergarten. He will start the rapid climb to independence, and that's all good. I'm all behind that. But with that ascent, the cloak of coolness that Bear and I have gotten to wear for the past four years will slowly slip from our shoulders, to be replaced by the Members Only windbreaker of shame, humiliation, and endless mortification.

The other source of the emotional rollercoasterness gets pinned to the act of shopping itself. Because, apparently, we started scanning the aisles of education about five years and two months too late. It's November and kindergarten classes are already full. They were full before the application deadline. They were full before the prehuman ooze decided to escape the genetic goo and develop legs and the opposable thumbs necessary to complete those applications.

To say, we should've started this process, you know, a lot earlier. Like right after our mad kitchen sex begat the cell cluster that ultimately yielded our widget.

(And that's why you will not hear what our first choice is. Because I know you will promptly fornicate, put your house on the market, move to Kansas City, and submit your enrollment form. Just to steal our spot. Just to spite us.)

Of course, that's all us and our fears. Finn couldn't be happier or more excited about the promotion. His ready, he tells us. And it doesn't really matter where, he says comfortingly. Because kindergarten, according to Finn, is where the learning really starts to happen. And not because of the magic of reading or the lure of semiassisted living. Not because he finally gets to walk the more subtle and effective avenues of rebellion.

No. None of that.

It's because kindergarten is where you finally, finally, finally, learn to how to fly.