1.
At approximately 11:16 a.m. my husband called me at home where I was working. After a brief discussion about how smoothly—relatively speaking—the first day of school drop-off had gone, he said, “You know…we are going to have to say something to the school because our girls need to eat more than that at lunch.”
“What do you mean,” I responded innocently, still basking in the glory of how well the morning had gone.
“Well, green beans is not enough for them to eat at lunch.”
“What!” and then came the sirens going off in my head.
2.
“Yes, since they didn’t want the Sloppy Joes, all the teacher offered was green beans, but that doesn’t seem like enough, does it?”
3.
The Pre-K kids place their lunch orders from a brief menu each morning. Then at lunch time, the food is brought to the classroom. Obviously there had been some sort of mix-up, and two of my three girls were apparently only going to get green beans for lunch? And I wasn’t picking them up until 3:00!
4.
Looking back, the morning, not to mention the entire week leading up to it, had been chaos. I had taken Jasmine to her classroom where she requested a peanutbutter sandwich, while my husband took Cinderella and S. Judy to their classroom. Our focus had been on making the separation stress-free and on getting S. Judy’s FM system (something that is used to direct the teacher’s voice right into her hearing aids) into the teacher’s hands, etc.
5.
It seemed to me that every other Pre-K student was navigating their first day with the help of two parents, while each of our girls had only two thirds of a parent helping them.
6.
My husband and I, along with the two parents of a set of twins, were running franticly back and forth between the two classrooms (the rooms were attached by a bathroom) saying our good-byes, while the other parents sat quietly with their kids and blew kisses. This is how it seemed.
7.
At the New Parent Coffee held just after drop-off in the cafeteria, I noticed that many of the singleton parents talked about how bittersweet it felt to have their kids at school now and how they would miss having little ones at home. By contrast, my head was still spinning from the effort of navigating a one mile walk through heavy pedestrian and automobile traffic with three four year olds—with one who simply had to climb up and jump off every stoop and bench and one who was “really, really” thirsty.
8.
The remainder of the afternoon I repeated to myself what several friends I called agreed with wholeheartedly—no one in their right mind would expect a four year old to eat just green beans for lunch.
9.
My husband’s defense: “It was
my first day, not the teacher’s.”
10.
What would be the harm you might ask? I was concerned that if they had been hungry the whole day and afraid to speak up, they would hate school and not want to go back.
11.
Or, that being very hungry would lead to a diminished ability to cope with the stresses of the first day, causing some serious meltdowns and leaving everyone with a very bad first impression of the girls.
12.
I ran to pick them up right at 3:00. They seemed completely fine and happy. "What did you have for lunch?" I asked Cinderella and S. Judy.
13. “Green beans.”
