Today was Elissa's first day at "big school", aka kindergarten. As you can see, she was pretty upset about the whole thing.
You should be able to click on some of these photo's for a larger version, although even the larger versions have been shrunk and cropped for the blog. All of the full size originals are in the complete set, but you'll need to sign in to see those. Contact me if you want details.
Without the hat. I'm not sure if she looks littler with or without it.
Her little red tie-like-thing now has a couple of extra additions; a name badge with a colour code designating which class she's in, and a little "perfect" sticker because, according to Elissa "She did good work".
With the hat. It has her name on it, which is supposed to reduce the time it takes to return to the owner when lost or forgotten. I wonder how long we'll have to wait to test this theory?
Carrying her bag, which is about half her size, but not overly heavy, yet.Like the hat, it also has her name on it. So far I don't think she's met any other "Elissas", although I'm sure she's met an "Alyssa" or two at various other activities. According to couple of web sites (like this one), "Alyssa" is about 30 times more popular than "Elissa", so she can trade off the uniqueness against having to spell it for people.
Click on the graph to embiggen.Obviously the population at large disagrees with me, but I still prefer "Elissa". I may or may not be biased.
We arrived about a couple of minutes after our appointed time, but Elissa was still the first one to her class room, so she has managed a little one on one time with her teacher already. We spoke to her teacher briefly in the playground when we picked Elissa up in the afternoon, apparently she had a good day and was quite talkative.
I can imagine Isaac's one-on-one teacher time being mostly out of school hours, or whenever they hold detention when that time comes around.
Note: One of these children may not be an actual kindergarten attendee. Perhaps one of Elissa's tasks should be to get in a few pre-emtive apologies on Isaac's behalf.For all the yelling they do at each other at home, Elissa is still quite protective of Isaac when we're out and about, and will often go around telling everyone "That' my brother Isaac, he's two and a half." (yeah, the one over there poking the polar bear with a stick)
Here's the view Elissa will be seeing a lot of this year.
All in all, she was pretty happy with her day, and says that she's ready to go back tomorrow. 1 day down approximately 2600 to go, well, until the end of high school anyway. The way time flies by these days, I estimate that ought to happen some time before Easter.
Here's the drawing she made and coloured to bring home.She was singing to herself in bed tonight when I left her, keen to do it all over again.
