All aboard for kindergarten!

My, it's been awhile, hasn't it? Does it help that I have an excuse or two -- or 10 --for not posting anything lately?

If you're one of Elijah's grandparents, who at last count accounted for approximately 80 percent of the readers of this blog, I'm guessing the answer is no.

But I'll try anyway: School has started (five dropoffs and pickups a week), I'm in physical therapy for a knee injury (two therapy visits a week), Elijah is seeing both a speech therapist and an occupational therapist (two therapy visits a week), and I'm temporarily working full time again (five round-trip commutes to downtown each week, arriving back home at 12:30 a.m.).

Technically, there are also bills to be paid and rooms to be cleaned and laundry and yard work and grocery shopping to be done, though as you might imagine, I'm not quite keeping up with it alone. (Thank you, Jeff, for being a fantastic dad and husband and mower of lawns and washer of clothes and grocery shopper!)

On top of it all, there are various houseguests on the way in the next few weeks. You all know who you are; please forgive us in advance for the state of the house. We actually do look forward to having you here, but you can't say you weren't warned.

(An aside: How do households with two full-time workers and more than one child manage to maintain their sanity? I simply couldn't do it!)

Kindergarten seems to be going reasonably well for Elijah. It's too early for parent-teacher conferences, although we have already had back-to-school night and parent information night and some other night whose purpose I can't even remember. Many other such nights are scheduled throughout the year -- book fair, curriculum night, and on and on, making me wonder how I made it through 12 years of public schools with nothing more than the occasional "open house." (Just fine, actually.)

So far, kindergarten has held no surprises -- Elijah's still ahead of the curve on academic stuff and behind on everything else.

That's why he's in occupational therapy, which focuses on getting him to follow instructions, work as part of a group and pay close attention to the behaviors, moods and words of others. We're hoping it will help close the gap between Elijah and typical kindergartners.

That gap is sometimes literal. When lining up to go somewhere, which appears to constitute a fairly big portion of a kindergartner's day, Elijah is always the one wandering off, or slowing down as the line makes its way down the hall -- to the point that children behind him are pushing him and begging him to get moving along. He doesn't seem to have much interest in moving along, preferring to wait until a teacher or aide takes him by the hand and speeds him up. I've always found it perfectly acceptable to pull him around from place to place, but of course the teachers at school have better things to do -- this ain't preschool!

And that's the shocker for him. After four years of preschool, he's become rather accustomed to being in a sheltered environment. Those classes consisted of a few kids with "special needs," like Elijah, and a few "peer models," who were chosen on the basis of personality traits tending toward the calm and quiet. And several adults were in each classroom.

But now he's in the rough-and-tumble of a mainstream kindergarten, where the girls talk nonstop and the boys roughhouse nonstop. Being not much of a talker and not much of a roughhouser, Elijah is a bit taken aback by it all, but he's doing well (with the help of an extra adult in the classroom) and seems to like it just fine. His skill with academic tasks when compared with the other kids gives him a bit of confidence, which helps. (He's been writing complete sentences for several years now, so this week's homework -- a worksheet on the letter "C" -- is not exactly a challenge.)

I don't really have time for much more of an update, but I'll try to sit down in the next week or so and share the (surprising) tale of what appears to be Elijah's favorite class.

Hint: His favorite color is now "rouge."

Au revoir ......