Today was Sofia's Kindergarten Assessment appointment at the public elementary school. Kindergarten officially begins next Wednesday, Sept. 1st.
As Sofia was quite oblivious to what any of this meant, and I pretty much played it down, she wasn't much phased by the whole thing. I, on the other hand, was a bit on the ridiculously nervous side as I'm not very good about bearing the weight of an untold secret. I felt like I would be found out and perhaps banished from the premises. So the truth is ...
... The truth is, I really have no intention (well, mostly no intention) of sending Sofia to public Kindergarten. I'll have to back up a bit to explain.
I've noticed a peculiar thing that keeps happening more and more in these late years (besides an increased inability to spell). I keep deciding to like things or do things that I absolutely abhorred or swore I would never do in my younger life. All my life, I only liked muted colors, then I painted the baby room two shades of aquamarine. I've never tolerated anything more than the blandest most boring foods in the world, now I can't get enough pepper, salt, garlic, onion, and paprika into everything I cook. I always thought Jenny Lind beds where for insane asylum decor; they caused me to gag every time I saw them in home decorating shows and then I bought one for Marcelo (it wasn't even new), and I absolutely love it.
Anyway, never on the planet would I have ever considered my most recent decision as something I'd wanted to do, much less have any capacity to do. I thought it was something for weird people, dumb people, or really smart people? I wasn't sure. Maybe for recluse people, for odd people, for people that like their children too much. I don't know. But somehow the more I read and learned about it, I slowly started moving over to the other side. So for various reasons (some having to do with socialization, geography, religion, interpersonal dynamics, family, personal values, and Sofia's unique personality) and after a trial period during the summer months, I committed and decided to home school Sofia.
Well, at least for now.
So, I've gone from working full time outside the home (the "outside the home" is now important distinction) with kids in full time day care to everyone being at home. Me, a stay at home mom, Ray working from home, and now home schooling. I tell ya, I have no idea how these things happen. Next thing you know, we'll start eating healthy and not eating out anymore. Oh wait, we already do that. But I refuse to use cloth diapers! I have to draw the line somewhere.
It's taken a little bit for the weirdness feeling to fade for me, although not really that long. (I thought maybe it would be so weird, I wouldn't be able to do it). But for Sofia, it seems completely natural and couldn't make more sense. I keep forgetting that it's not weird to her at all.
So, we went to the assessment appointment. I didn't know how to tell her to not just blab out that we had no intention of coming back really. That we were just checking it out. I didn't want to confuse her if the teacher were to make a lot of comments like, "We'll see you in class next week". I told her that she just didn't need to say anything about the home schooling thing. She eagerly offered to keep it a secret which immediately made me feel even more weird and nervous. So, I told her never mind on the whole thing and just to talk about it if she wanted to or not if she didn't.
In the car, she told me she was going to be "..very, very shy". I can't make any sense of that but when we arrived and introduced ourselves to the teacher, she was very, very shy for about one minute and then she proceeded to tell the teacher how she pretty much knew everything about everything. "I already know how to read", "Oh, the alphabet is easy, super easy for me", "I know how to count by the thousands!". Great.
So the testing went on for quite a while as she kept advancing to more challenging tasks kind of like a game show. Her over confidence bit her in the arse a couple of times though. The teacher asked her to count some items using any method she wanted that were clearly more than ten. Sofia arrogantly (but innocently) told her she liked to count by two's. The only problem was that I knew she can only count by two's up to ten. So when she got to ten, she had a bit of a brain fart as she didn't quite know how to proceed. The teacher told her she could continue by one's if she wanted and she was able to get through the task. But I thought it was quite funny. Maybe because this personality trait of hers, even at this young age, is the complete opposite of me. I would never dare to say I was a genius at anything unless I knew for certain there was no one the earth that knew it better than me.
At the end, she got to pick a book to take home and a poster to fill out about herself. I'm not sure what we'll do with the poster. I think family members may have to start enduring some presentations soon.
And since, I've fallen so far behind with updating Sofia's blog, I will be back filling some things from the summer behind this post.
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