Today has been better than yesterday, with a brief detour into OMG HOLY CRAP PANIC territory.  AE’s elementary school called and informed me that part of his shot record was missing.  Yes, we know he’s up to date, they said, and yes, we realize he is almost six, but we still need to know what shots he had at two months old.  Which is all well and good, but we lived in Colorado at the time and our health care provider was the massive Kaiser Permanente conglomerate.  So after freaking out and making approximately 5.6 zillion phone calls to obnoxiously automated systems, I finally was able to obtain the elusive record of his immunizations prior to 9/16/2003.  GOOD LORD.  (I won’t even mention my frustration over the fact that I registered AE for school in May and they tell me about this less than 4 business days out.)

In other similar news, my friend and commenter Betty read this post about the mysterious school menu.  She used to work in the local school system and so she had no qualms about calling to ask exactly what the asterisks meant.  Apparently they mean those items are made with turkey.  (Even the ham.  I did not know about turkey ham, but Betty assures me that it does exist.  It’s like tofurkey, but…not.)  I presume that this means that the pigs represent days where pork products are on the menu.  In sausage or pepperoni form, as far as I can tell.  So there you go.

I think we’re about ready.  Thursday night we’ll go meet AE’s new teacher and drop off his supplies, and he seems excited about that (if puzzled as to why school doesn’t start the very next day).  He has a closetful of new clothes, much nicer than the secondhand playclothes I send him to preschool in.  He’s pumped that naptime at kindergarten will only be a half-hour as opposed to the two hours of quiet time allotted in his current class.  His dad and I are pumped that we only have to pay about $100 a month for after-school care now, a tiny fraction of what we were paying for full-time care. 

This time last year I was frustrated that he wasn’t quite old enough for kindergarten (his birthday is a mere 15 days after the cutoff) and we had to pay another full year of daycare/preschool for a child that could already read.  Now that we’re actually here, I realize that neither one of us were ready for him to start then.  With his careful, cautious personality he’ll do better as one of the oldest in the class, and I won’t have to worry so much about him.  It worked out better this way, I think.   

Yep, I’m pretty sure we’re ready now.  Let’s see if I can make it through Monday morning without crying about MAH PRESHUS BABEE ALL GROWN UP.  WAH.