Graduation

Pre-school is officially over. Alyssa's graduation ceremony on Friday night gave me yet another opportunity to prove that I should NEVER, EVER be in charge of capturing these precious moments on film, digital or otherwise. I had the camera perfectly positioned and ready to shoot as she made her grand entrance (with flair, I might add). Perfect photo-op. And then, I pressed the wrong button and turned the camera off. Great job, Mom!

After receiving their "diplomas", each class sang a song, then each kid went to the microphone to answer 2 simple questions: 1) what did you like most about pre-school? and 2) what do you want to be when you grow up? Popular answers to question No. 1 included coloring, playing outside, making friends, etc. Not surprisingly, Alyssa most enjoyed coloring. Question No. 2 elicited aspirations of becoming astronauts, policemen, firefighters, doctors. Alyssa? She wants to be a bunny.

WHAAAT?

I work with a woman whose daughter (now 20'ish) declared at a school function when she was about 5 or 6 years old that she wanted to be a brain surgeon when she grew up. She was ridiculed and pooh-poohed by teachers and fellow students and their parents. Guess what? Some 15 or so years later, said daughter has been accepted into the MD/PhD program in neurosurgery at the University of Illinois. See, this is the kind of stuff that was going through my mind as I awaited Alyssa's turn at the mike. Now all I see are carrots.

The other night, I was picking up around the house and decided it was time to do something with her pre-school homework folder. It had been sitting on the table in the foyer for over a week because there was no homework left to be done and I wasn't ready to part with it. I cleaned it out and then stared at it, wondering if I should save it. After all, it was her first homework folder. What if she gets to be 30 years old and wants to see what her first homework folder looked like? If I throw it away, will I be discarding all of her pre-school memories? In the end, I threw it out. It was empty, after all, because I'd already removed the important papers throughout the year. At any rate, I may be completely inept at camera operation, utterly failing to digitize my first-born's first scholastic milestone. Danny, the master of machinery, did capture this auspicious occasion on video...the summation of Alyssa's formative school years...

Our little bunny.