Preschool a first for son and mom

My little man started preschool this week.

I’d been building up his anticipation to this vaunted event for weeks now, discussing the school over and over with him and what he might do during the day with his little class. He met with his new teacher informally a few weeks earlier so that they might get to know each other in the preschool setting, and he had been utterly enraptured and enthusiastic.

About playing with the black Fisher Price truck in the preschool nursery, that is.

Every time I brought up the anticipatory preschool discussion, he eagerly spoke of playing with the black truck that had caught his fancy days earlier.

I tried to capture his attention with all the other things he would be doing.

Since this preschool has all the children eating lunch together before their parents pick them up, my son and I went out together to purchase his first lunchbox.

Because I procrastinated and delayed the lunchbox selection until after almost all school supplies had been carefully picked over, my son had only two choices for lunchboxes: Pirates of the Caribbean and Diego The Explorer, whom I assume is some sort of long lost second cousin eight times removed from the scary brilliant and charismatic PBS character Dora.

I knew immediately which lunchbox my little boy would chose, because he’s had a thing against pirates ever since he saw Palmer High School’s production of “Pirates of Penzance” last year. My son adores musicals, and this show was no exception. However, the baby sitter he adores was in this production and he is extremely possessive of her. In one scene, pirates swarmed over the stage and captured all the local girls, one of whom was his venerated baby sitter — the one he also calls his girlfriend. My son did not take this well, jealousy being a key component here, and has henceforth avowed a sincere and abiding dislike for all pirates.

Suffice it to say, my son is now the proud owner of a green Diego lunchbox. Since he has never actually seen the cartoon attributed to Diego, I can honestly say he has no clue who’s on his lunchbox. He just knows it’s not pirates.

To my son, starting preschool this week was something he was excited about but relatively clueless about.

For me, it was the end of his toddlerhood and the beginning of his growing up into something besides a loud miniature of his father.

My husband desperately wanted to be here when his son had his first day of preschool, but such was not to be, so he lived vicariously through the photos I took.

I took a picture of my son getting dressed in his first day of preschool clothes and another photo of him eating breakfast on his first day. I took a photo of him helping to make the peanut butter and jelly that was intended for his lunchbox, but which I ultimately replaced with another sandwich not nearly as mangled and more recognizable as a food object.

I took a picture of him in front of his preschool and a picture of him inside his classroom.

The last photo I took was him wildly waving his hands at me to shoo me out the door.

I was touched to think I might have captured forever on film the first picture of him being humiliated in public by his mother.

His preschool went on for three hours in the morning, and on that first day those three hours seemed to linger. My daughter and I got some much-needed one-on-one time together, which she responded to delightedly by sleeping.

I paced the house a bit, wondering if I had made sure the school had my phone number in case it needed to call me for an emergency. I also had a severe talk with myself about the maturity of my reactions, reminding myself that my son had been going to part-time day care for years now whenever it was needed, and that this was nothing new.

I then realized that my cats were giving me odd looks the longer I continued in discussions with myself, so I rapidly quit that train of thought.

I wondered what he was learning, if anything, that first day and if he would come home knowing new and interesting subjects, like finally figuring out that the cartoon side of his underwear goes in back.

I wondered how he was playing with the other children and if I would make friends with their parents and have them over to play.

I wondered if he was being included in group activities and accepted by his new schoolmates or if he was going to be the little boy who ate lunch by himself.

When I picked him up at school that afternoon, I eagerly asked him my questions and gave him no time to respond before I fired another question off. In between my volley of questions, my cell phone rang.

It was my husband, and he had stayed up very late in Iraq specifically to ask our son how his first day of school had gone.

Our son eagerly took the phone from me and told his father excitedly all about the most important thing that had happened to him that momentous first day of preschool.

“Daddy, I got to play with the black truck!” he said. “Just like yours.”

My husband bought a new black F-150 about a year before he deployed. It’s in our garage during his stay in Iraq. My son knows it as Daddy’s truck and always refers to it as such.

His entire eagerness for starting preschool and attending his class was so that he could tell his Daddy he got to play with a truck like his.

My husband was quite proud and felt that our son could learn a lot at this new preschool.

Tiffany Horvath is the mother of two and the stepmother of one. Her husband, Drew, is deployed to Iraq. She writes every Sunday abut life at home for the wife of a deployed soldier.