Growing Up Gracie

In all the hustle and bustle of Bean Man starting kindergarten, Gracie was sort of overlooked.

Well, not really. But SHE thinks she was overlooked.

We made sure that with everything we celebrated for Bean, we were celebrating just as much with Gracie.

Yay! You get to go into a new classroom!

Yay! You get to eat lunch in the cafeteria this year! (Which was the greatest thing to happen in Gracie’s short little life so far. She tells us about the ‘cafetewia’ every day.)

Yay! You get to see your new friends again!

I even took her to get her nails done with me on the afternoon before school started.  She thought she was the bees knees sitting in her own manicure chair.  I thought she looked entirely too old and I immediately came home and put her hair back in piggy tails just to make myself feel better.

To her credit, Gracie mostly took Bean’s new milestone in stride. She was excited and happy for him, and she was very patient when we did fuss all over him.

But there was one tiny hiccup.

On the day we dropped her off for her first day back at daycare, she happily bounced inside the building and did her pageant wave to the front office ladies. But then she stopped dead in her tracks when we got to her new classroom and she put her hands on her hips and turned to me. “Uhhh… THIS is not kindergarten,” she sneered.

Apparently, the entire time we were getting Bean ready for kindergarten, Gracie thought SHE was going to kindergarten, too.

True to form, though, it took her about 2.8 seconds to recover before she was sashaying into her new classroom, hugging all her friends that she hadn’t seen all summer.

This girl slays me. She has such a definite, strong personality. In fact, we’ve already gotten our first note home this week about her not listening… But as much as she can fluster and frustrate me, I always laugh to myself when I remember that this is the exact same personality she came home from the hospital with. She was born a moody (though, they call it “colic” in infants these days…), dramatic, opinionated, wonderfully funny spitfire. So why should she grow up to be anything different?

Although, if she could learn to listen during that damn circle time, it would be awesome.