New Discoveries in an Old Routine

As I begin this post, it's 11:20p.m. on Tuesday evening, and I already know that I'll be dragging when the alarm clock starts buzzing in the morning.  But, I've had some thoughts circling my mind in a never-ending loop the last few days, and I need to get them out, so here I sit, on the couch, blogging when I should be already asleep.  Alas.

About 6 weeks ago, Kaleb was diagnosed with ADHD by his pediatrician and began taking a daily dose of Adderall to aid him in regaining control of himself.  To say the least, it feels as if our lives have been transformed.  It took a bit of trial and error to settle upon the correct dosage for Kaleb—just enough to get the job done, but not enough to turn him into a pre-school zombie—but when the right dosage was tested, it was like a magic spell!  He's not a perfect kid, and we still aggravate one another immeasurably sometimes (he's 3 years old, and we are both redheads), but pretty much everything has improved by the introduction of this little pill into our morning routines.

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Many people who know me already know that Kaleb began Pre-K 3 at Escambia Christian School yesterday (Monday) on the first day of the 2012-2013 school year.  It wasn't something I had really prepared for, and was arranged on relatively short notice—the reasons behind our withdrawal from Malena's Mini School will be the topic of another post.

As a student at a "big kid" school, Kaleb is no longer supplied a lunch as part of our tuition fees.  We have the option of either purchasing for him a cafeteria lunch every day or packing him a lunch.  We have chosen to pack his lunch Mon-Fri and let him buy lunch at school on Fridays when the backpack space normally occupied by a lunch box will be needed to send home his napping gear to be washed over the weekend.

On Sunday evening when I packed his Monday lunch, I wanted to find some way to remind him mid-day that I loved him and was thinking about him.  It would have been simple to include a "Mommy love note," but Kaleb is only 3½ and doesn't read yet.  I had just finished making his sandwich when the idea hit me to paint a heart onto it.  I found a tiny, new paintbrush and washed it really well.  Then I dipped it over and over into a 4-drop puddle of red food coloring and painted a red heart right onto the bread of his sandwich.  Kaleb and I have talked many times about pictures of heart meaning that one person loves another, so I hoped he would understand my meaning when he opened his lunch.

It worked, and it was the first thing Kaleb wanted to tell me about when I picked him up from school on Monday afternoon.....well, the first thing he told me about AFTER he soaked up some hugs and told me he had been worried about me when I was later than planned getting there to pick him up (thanks to buses that arrived at our school nearly 45 minutes late).  He said he had opened his lunch and saw my heart and told his teacher that it was there because his mommy loved him.  Yup.  That's exactly why it was there!  And at the tender age of 3, he is thankfully still young enough that he doesn't think that Mommy love is totally uncool.

I guess I just thought that his excitement over the painted sandwich was due to the novelty of having a picture painted onto his food, and so I was caught a bit off guard when I went to tuck him into bed last night.  I told him that I was going to make his lunch for the next day (today) and then go to bed myself.  He hugged me, and he said "Don't forget to put your heart in my lunchbox, Mommy!"  So that's exactly what I did, both literally and metaphorically.  I carefully crafted his sandwich, made sure to include a spoon for his applesauce, and drew a big red heart onto the wrapper of his Rice Krispies Treat dessert.

Today, on the drive home from school, he asked me, "Can I have a heart in my lunch every day?"  And I, of course, said yes.

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With the exception of the 2 friends I made while working at Waffle House 8 years ago, I have never mixed work and friends.....until I got settled into my job at the school.  I had worked with people I couldn't stand, people I could tolerate to varying degrees, and some people that I actually kinda liked.  But I had never made friends or shared any of my personal self with my coworkers.

It's so nice that this has not been the case working at the school.  I'm still not spending all my weekends hanging out with coworkers on the weekends or anything, but I have met people that I can allow myself to trust and to share myself with.  These are people that I genuinely like, and some that I love with the love of a friend.  While it's not always easy to look forward to another day with middle school students, I can still always look forward to going to school and working with friends each day.  So to Terri, Teresa, Melissa, Karyn, Cheri, and Mike (and anyone who my foggy brain has forgotten at this late hour): Thank you for introducing me to the world of work-induced friendships, a world that I never imagined was real.

Well, it's nearly midnight now and the alarm is set for 6a.m.  To whomever it is that actually reads these posts: Good night.