William's last day of preschool

Today was William's last day at Westminster. It was his last day of pre-K.

Here he is, after I picked him up for the very last time today at noon:




















I'm now telling myself, "Self, your son has officially finished preschool and will be heading toward kindergarten in just a few short months. That's right. Your son. The one who was born five years ago. The one who can button his own shirts and write his name and uses words like "awkward" and "devour" correctly in conversations. The one who's ready for kindergarten. That one."

As you can probably surmise, I'm still trying to get my brain around this. Intellectually, I know that it's just the next logical step, but emotionally, I'm sort of staggering around, clutching my chest, and moaning, "My baby! He can't be ready for that yet!"

The thing is...he IS ready. He's totally ready. His teachers have been saying for months that he's ready. And he really is. And really, I'm ready, too. I've been working on getting used to it for awhile now. I'm almost there. I just need a few more weeks to really get used to it. And by the time the first day of kindergarten rolls around in early August (gulp), I will be ready.

It's helped that we've had a few transitional activities along the way. There was the Mother's Day tea a couple of weeks ago. And there was the end-of-the-year class pool party yesterday. (Spider-Man made an appearance.)



















Those sorts of things helped me prepare for the inevitable. And like I said, I mostly feel pretty good. I may be a little wobbly, come August, when I'm dropping William off at the elementary school FULL OF GIANT OLDER KIDS, but again, I've got some time to work on that. Plus, William will be attending a couple of weeks of day camp at church this summer, so it's not a complete break altogether just yet.

And oh, we got the sweetest little DVD of the Purple Room that William's teachers made and sent home with him today. I just watched it with him, and we grinned and sniffled through the whole thing.

Still. Wow. I can't believe the end of preschool is already here. I know that it's such a cliche to wax on and on about how it feels like just yesterday I was dropping him off for his first day of "school" at about 16 months. But well, it does sort of feel like that morning wasn't so very long ago.

Remind me of all this in another 13 years when he's about to graduate from high school. I probably won't be able to comprehend how fast the time passes then, either.