I Went To Half Day Kindergarten, And All I Got Was This Stupid Ability To Overanalyze Things I Can't Control.

My boys will leave the 3rd and the 5th grade behind them next Thursday and march forward into the summer with intermediate wishes and junior high school dreams.  Which means that I have a kid in junior high school and that means I am officially old.  What's worse is that my little baby girl will be enjoying her last summer before she, too, is enrolled in public school, and what that means is that I will officially have three school-aged children.

Someone get me a walker already.

When my oldest son, the one who will be going to dances with girls next school year, was entering kindergarten, our school had a full day kinder classroom and a half day one, too. The state (of Colorado, yes I'm a dirty American) offered every child Monday thru Friday, nine to noon kindergarten and our school offered the options of a tuition-based full day. The two classrooms ran on totally different schedules; one to accommodate the necessary learning for the half-dayers and one to spread things out for the full-dayers and incorporate gym, music and art.

Being a school on a city boundary that fairly clearly delineated the haves and the have-nots, the classrooms filled much as you'd expect, with the poorer students, the ones on free or reduced lunch, the ones who didn't fully speak English and so on in the half-day room and the wealthier students, the ones who were financially secure and, for the most part, white filled the full day room. 

My son went half days. 

All year old I fretted that he was missing out, that he wasn't learning something those other kids were, that he was going to Permanently Suffer for his mother and father's failure to get him into the Proper Classroom. I studied the projects those kids hung up in the school halls; cleverly placed cotton balls on construction paper and milk cartons turned into fairy-tale houses, and I sank within my own shame for having let my child down in such a monstrous way.

And then he entered first grade, all of his classmates did, and those two separate classrooms melded and mixed. And from about the second week of school on, you couldn't guess if you had to which kid had been in which classroom.

When my second son followed suit two years later, he'd already had a brother going full days for years, and that boy wanted to each school lunch more than anything in his whole entire life. Disneyland? Bollocks! Bring on the orange trays and the long foldable tables! He was determined to go to school full day come kindergarten, but the problem was that I didn't want him to. I'd been watching the kindergartners since my first son graduated, and eyes without guilt see much more clearly. I saw tired, hungry, and most of all SMALL children leading very grown up lives. I watched them shuffle from math class to art class to gym class. I watched them struggle to learn five different teachers names and desk-side manners. I watched them grow up faster than they could, and I realized that I'd done my son a service by keeping him on the half day class all those years ago.

Of course, my second son ended up going full days.

By that point, the school had received enough interest, and the district had granted enough financial assistance, that they no longer could justify keeping a half day classroom. Of the 50 children registered to begin that fall, four of them requested half days. The option was yanked off the table. My son had to go full day, I had to pay the tuition, and that was just that. Of course, I could pull him out after the first half of the day, but he definitely would be missing out on education then, because the classrooms were not running of half day schedules anymore.

I fretted that I'd done him wrong, that I was sending him to the wrong school, that perhaps I should have just kept him home with me until first grade. I watched for behavior changes, for sleep changes, for anxiety and exhaustion and hunger. Not surprisingly, I saw none of it. Of course he was just fine, and all of those kids were just fine, and of course what I'd thought I'd saw in the other students before was just me making myself feel better in my own head.

Because children are adaptable, and will make the best of whatever comes their way. They'll learn no matter what, they'll socialize no matter what, and they'll grow up no matter how hard I try to stop them.

So, naturally, when it came time to start looking into preschool for my daughter this fall, and when I heard that preschool and kindergarten are still only half days here in BC, I got worried. Worried that we should never have moved here because she's going to miss out on some key learning time in those formidable years. And then I read that BC and Ontario are both toying around with the idea of full-day kindergarten across the board, and I got worried. Worried that my little baby girl was going to be shoved into a classroom and a schedule that she was in no way prepared or mature enough to handle, and that maybe we should never have moved her and maybe it's time I just homeschooled these kids already.

And then I told myself to stop overthinking it, to just let it go, and remembered that it's all going to work our fine either way, that whatever happens will be the right thing for her.  Just like it always has been.

This is an original post for Canada Moms Blog by Mr Lady, who occasionally writes at Whiskey In My Sippy Cup and still just can't understand the appeal of school lunch to anyone.  Ever.