Emrick is Five Years Old!

Emrick turned five years old about a month ago, and I never did a post about it! I’m a terrible mom! Or maybe just a terrible blogger! Yes, that’s it! I’m a terrible blogger!

Emrick is doing well. He was moved into a regular Kindergarten class a few weeks ago, after several assessments administered at school revealed that he was ready for it (In an earlier post I explained the fact that he was initially enrolled in something called Transitional Kindergarten. You can read that post here for an explanation of what that is and why Emrick was in it). So four weeks into the school year he switched classes and teachers. I was a little sad about this. He loved his TK teacher and had made some friends, including a little girl whom he “loved”. So I had mixed feelings about it. The school didn’t force us to do this, of course; they just said that he was more than ready for Kindergarten and if we wanted to move him, we could. Given my hesitation, I told his teacher and the principal (who had me in for a meeting) that we only wanted to move him if it was something they strongly recommended based on his assessments. It was. At this meeting, I also met the teacher whose class he would be entering, and she was very enthusiastic about having him in her class. I left the meeting feeling good about it.

But when he moved into his new class the following week, I wondered if we had made the right decision. For one, I didn’t realize at the time that whereas there had been a full-time teacher’s helper in TK, there was no such person — at all — in Kindergarten. The class was bigger, too. So he moved from a class of 18 with two adults present, to a class of 25 with just one adult. It’s not tragic, but it’s certainly not to the benefit of the students. Anyway, after the initial switch, when he asked me sadly why his old TK teacher and his TK classmates wouldn’t be joining him in his new Kindergarten class, he adjusted pretty well and now seems to be doing just fine. He enjoys going, and likes telling me about what he did in class. There are some social aspects of his experience that I’m keeping an eye on (perhaps I’ll elaborate on that at another time), but he seems to mostly be doing ok with that, too. There’s a girl in his new class whom he plays with often and he is invited to her upcoming birthday party, where “pony rides” are promised. “Ooooh, I sure do want a pony ride,” he said to me when I told him about it. Truthfully, I have a very hard time imagining Emrick agreeing to mount a pony, but I have a very easy time imagining him being too scared to do it. We’ll see!

What else is our belated birthday boy up to? Well, he’s on a solar system kick now. He knows a whole lot of stuff that I don’t know/don’t remember, like the names of the other dwarf planets in our solar system besides Pluto (there are others?) as well as the names of some of Jupiter’s moons. He’s also a bit obsessed with the earth’s layers, asking me every time he plays in the yard if he is standing on the earth’s crust, and when he moves to concrete asking me if he is still standing on the earth’s crust.

He’s also a master of remembering past experiences and suddenly mentioning them out of nowhere. Like tonight when I tucked him in he asked, “Mommy, who was that fourteen-year-old girl who came to visit us in Florida a long, long time ago?”

“You mean Sinead?” I asked. Clark and Sinead came down for a couple of days when we were visiting Mom and Dad in July.

“That’s right. Sinead,” he grinned.

“You had a lot of fun playing with her, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. She’s crazy like I’m crazy,” he said.

Emrick is 39 inches tall and weighs about 35 pounds. My BABY is in Kindergarten, and he is still a pookie.

Emrick was still in TK on his birthday, and he got a special birthday crown at school.

A birthday certificate, too!

Emrick requested a Shaun the Sheep cake for his birthday. It’s not terribly impressive, but he was pleased with it!