Friday was a special day for me, I feel the need to honour it by telling this story.
If you have read any of my posts leading up to September (aka my going to school posts) clearly it's been an adjustment to send my second boy to full time school. Either I am emotional about it or he is, we take turns. A solid 3 weeks in the beginning he wouldn't even get on the bus so I had no choice but to drive him there and drop him crying in the arms of his teachers. You can try to express how hard it is to push your children towards a good thing, "school" the holy grail of independence, and no matter what you can't know how much it sucks until it happens to you. It's the one time you as a parent can do nothing to help the situation other than removing yourself.
So much suck.
This Christmas I thought the gifts for the teachers should be especially special, I really wanted them to know how much I appreciated their extra care. They have really been exceptional.. in turn that helped me so much knowing Gabriel's first experience with school is such a positive one. So I gave Gabriel the idea when I was thinking up teacher gifts to give them something nice for Christmas and he insisted to spend an hour decorating their gift bags himself. I bought them both cute silver apple necklaces from Stella and Dot and Gabriel approved, put them inside, carried them proudly to school and gifted them himself. I also got a nice gift for Ethan's teacher, don't get me wrong she's also great.. it's hard to keep him on task and I appreciate her job with him as well. Ethan also spent a lot of time drawing a nice card for her and because I see her in school for pizza day I know she's gluten intolerant so that info was great to get her some gluten-free treats and a mug with hot chocolate, I think she liked it :)
So my story starts finally, every Friday pizza day I volunteer at the school to organize their lunch as part of a team of 3 moms. We chat, it's fun and we're pretty popular since we hand out the equivalent of cigarettes in prison. You can get kids to carry hot heavy boxes of pizza to classrooms if you pay them in pizza.. legit it's a currency. When I went there this Friday and when our job is done as usual I went to each of the boys classes to give them my extra slice that I get for volunteering. Ethan insists on it or else I'd think I was embarrassing him but he loves bragging about me helping at school for some reason. It's very cute.. he tried getting me a job as a bus driver lol. Gabriel likes seeing me but doesn't make any big deal that I'm there at all ironically and keeps eating his lunch.. but I get to chat with his teachers a bit while I'm there, they usually want to show me something he's been doing or pictures they take. Really, they're the exception to even pretty great Kindergarten teachers at the school and I've seen them outside school hours it's really not a mask they put on they care about all their kids quite a bit.
This week one of the teachers just thanked me very much for the gift she wears it everyday and I thought that was so sweet.. his other teacher told me a story; one of her good friends was just diagnosed with leukaemia over the Christmas holidays and when she went to visit her she took her gift inside the bag Gabriel decorated and told her that it was from one of her most special students and she wanted her to have it.
Let me tell you I cried my eyes out in the hallway, holding pizza.. and she did too. I cannot even type it without the tears so I have refused to even tell anyone about it more than once, except here, because there's no way to do it without losing my crap. Is that not the sweetest thing you've ever heard, ever? Dammit... all the 'feels' are pretty nice.
