Yesterday, my daughter Audra finished her last day of Kindergarten.

When she got on the bus in the morning, she was just a wee kindergartener.  At the beginning of the year she could barely sound out words, had no idea what subtraction was and had never even heard the phrase “school lunch.”

But yesterday, when she stepped off that bus, she was a wily first grader – a kid who reads chapter books, likes to do math problems for fun and knows that she doesn’t want to buy her lunch on Wednesdays, because that’s when they serve “pork dippers,” and what the hell is that anyway?

In some ways she’s not that different than the little girl I put on the bus 9 months ago.   She hasn’t grown that much and she still likes to dress up as a princess (in fact on Tuesday, both she and my son Asher were dressed up as princesses, and he kept asking me, “daddy, am I beautiful?”) but in other ways she has changed so much.

When I think about what she has learned this year, it blows me away.  She literally entered school barely able to sound out C-A-T and now she fluently breezes through books and has discarded many of her old favorites as “too easy.”

She has also changed in other ways.  There is a cartoon that we sometimes watch called “Kim Possible.”  I like it because it is just witty enough to make it tolerable.  If, for whatever reason, I need to be watching TV with the kids, I’d rather watch Kim Possible over something like Barney which would require me to slowly spoon my eyeballs out with a spork.

Anyway.

There’s a song that comes on over the opening credits and Audra used to always get up and do this wild, twirling, cheerleader meets gymnasts meets Madonna meets SNL sketch dance that ends with her down on one knee, arms in the air, posing and awaiting applause.

A couple of weeks ago she was lying on the couch and the theme song came on, and she just continued laying there.

I paused the TV and stared at her.  “Aren’t you going to get up and dance?”

Without taking her eyes off the frozen TV set she said, “nah, I don’t feel like it.”

What the…?

When did my 6 year old turn into a sullen teenager?  Give her a bag of cheetos and a cellphone and she could have been 17!
Looking back, this school year just flew by. 

I’m not so much of an 80 year old grandmother to say “it seems like I put her on the bus for the first time just yesterday!” 

But it does seem like it was maybe only a couple of months ago.

The whole year has disappeared in a flash and I feel like I still know so little about what her days at school are like.

I volunteered in the class whenever I could get someone to schedule me, but it wasn’t that often.  I wouldn’t recognize most of her classmates and certainly couldn’t name them all (some of the weird ones stick in my mind pretty well though).  She had three teachers over the course of the year thanks to some medical leave and a new class being added and I don’t feel like I know any of them particularly well either. 

She has a whole world that I am not only not a part of, but don’t even know the basics of.

Sure, she tells me random stories from the school day, but they tend to be bizarre non-sequiturs that don’t make a lot of sense out of context.

“Today while we were gluing shoes on to the wall Danny said that I smelled good.”

“Wait a minute… You were gluing shoes?…. Danny ….. What?”

“We were gluing shoes on the WALL!” she says to me as if

A) I’m a moron and

B) it was the wall aspect that was the only confusing part here.

“Why were you gluing shoes on the wall?”

“Because the teacher said that we had to put shoes there because we were working on math!”

“Uh… Ok… what do shoes have to do with math again?”

(Giant sigh from my daughter)  “The shoes are from how many kind of shoes we had!”

“Uh…. and you were gluing your shoes to the wall?”

“NO!  Not shoes!  Paper that looked like shoes!”

“Ok”

“Don’t you get it?  We were taking paper that looked like shoes and gluing them to the wall and that showed how much math we had!”

“Uh…. Ok….. sure.  Now about this Danny character….he smelled you?”

“Yeah.  He thinks I’m beautiful.”

Oh brother.

It’s like studying a whole other world but you only get blips of unrelated information that you have to piece together to try to make sense of it.  I feel like one of those scientists that dug up all the dinosaur bones and put the wrong dino head on the wrong dino body thus creating a dinosaur that had never really been a dinosaur, so that an entire generation of boys grew up saying that the brontosaurus was their favorite dinosaur only to discover that the brontosaurus never even existed and so we had to start saying that the diplodocus was our favorite, but it really wasn’t.

Ok, so that’s a bad analogy, but my point still stands. 

I know less and less about my daughter’s life now and it is likely to continue that way until I’m just the old embarrassing guy in the minivan who “doesn’t understand” and “doesn’t get her.”

Ok.  Maybe I’m making too much of this. 

It’s just kindergarten after all.

In lots of places they don’t even have full day kindergarten.  The kids come home at noon having learned nothing and never even getting to set foot in the cafeteria.  For those parents this year probably just felt like one long, free, preschool.

But for me, it’s just one more step along the path of my kids growing up.

We were at some store yesterday and a little old lady came up to me.  I knew what she was going to say before she even said it.

“Oh, they grow up so quickly.  Don’t you wish you could just freeze them at this age forever?”

I told her that I would kind of like to freeze our 1 year old at a slightly older age, preferably one where he could talk, use the potty, and not scream so much, but, yes, I did kind of wish that.  Because there’s a big part of me that loves the age that my kids are at right now and I’m scared of not knowing what they’ll be like at that next age.

I am so excited for my little girl.  I am so excited that she loves school, is learning so much and seems to be growing into a beautiful, smart, quirky young lady (who smells good).

But it’s hard.

It’s hard to see that infant that you used to sing to sleep every night hoist a giant back pack over her shoulder and climb onto that school bus. 

And it’s even harder to see her climb off that big bus, knowing she is one year older, one year smarter and one year closer to growing up, and leaving the home you created just for her. 

It’s hard.  But it’s beautiful.

Just like Audra.