Kind of.

Tonight I said to Lucy, “tomorrow is the last day of no Kindergarten! Can you believe it??” And she said, “You know, kind of.”

Hard for me to believe, apparently, but not her. She’s been gearing up for days, weeks, months… since preschool ended three months ago, really. Which might as well be three years, in five-year-old time.

First, in May, we went to Kindergarten registration, where we met the principal and filled out forms listing all the tropical diseases to which she had, or had not, been exposed. Because that was, oddly, both overwhelming and incredibly dull, we then went back just for a visit. We saw the Kindergarten classrooms, the playground, the art and music rooms, the library… far from dull, but at least as overwhelming. We got a few months to digest it, and then, just when the memory had started to fade, we got the Kindergarten supplies list in the mail. Ahh, school supplies. Don’t we all pine for the days of shopping for school supplies? Well, guess what, it turns out to be one of the perks of sending your child out into the cruel world. There was no shopping in preschool, mind you. But now, shopping we went. Fat pencils, glue sticks, safety scissors, sparkly folders… they were all on the list. Well, folders were on the list, the sparkly part was optional. If I squinted my eyes and tilted my head just so, I could still believe she was three and we were just pretending to shop for school, that we would take it all home and she would use the glue sticks to glue the pencils together and the scissors to cut the folders to tiny bits that I would inexplicably find in the soap four days later.

But then, last week, the charade ended. On Friday we went to – no joke – Kindergarten orientation. Which involved – no joke – a PowerPoint presentation about Kindergarten. Which the actual Kindergarteners found – no surprise – incredibly boring. About halfway through the second slide, the Kindergarten teachers were already promising the students they had not yet even met that it would be over soon. Which, much like the five years preceding it, it was.

And now, here we are, less than thirty-six hours from liftoff. Can I believe it?

You know, kind of.