Tell Me About Your Child

I was just fine until I got to the Tell Me About Your Child form. The first day of school is always busy, a whirling of early waking and getting there and getting through. And we did it. We had a heck of a day. I liked my students, my kids liked their teachers and everybody liked the spaghetti and meatballs for dinner.

And now they are all in bed. (Take THAT late summer nights!) And the lunches are made and the uniforms laid out and I have settled in with my ballpoint and pile of forms: the usual permissions and doctors’ phone numbers and handbook agreements and then this.

For the first grader, tucked at the back of the pile, a questionnaire. Oh, the things I could tell you about my child. There is suddenly a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye and I don’t understand how a school form just stops me dead in my tracks.

And I am not sure how to condense his whole self into six questions on a form.
Oh, to put all the dreams on this paper. My goals for my son? His special qualities include? How does he approach learning?

Does she really want to know?

He approaches learning, that’s for sure!! I’m not sure she can handle the truth: the animal habitats that he makes in the yard (and the dead frog attempted-resuscitation on the air hockey table), the cardboard collection that clogs the basement stairs and collects in his closet, the Lego world that tumbles through my dining room.

She’ll learn soon enough that he is everybody’s friend. Trust me, it won’t take long to see him hug his buddies and check on someone who falls on the playground or demand that someone give him a piggy back at recess. And they always do. He is pretty magical.

He won’t finish anything. (Well maybe now that he is at the ripe old age of seven, but I think he had a pretty solid non-finishing policy last year.) Oh, he’ll start with gusto and a passion I’ve rarely seen, but it takes a pretty amazing Lego set to keep him going to the finish. He lives in the moment, and he lives with fire. The heat may surprise her and it will certainly keep her on her toes.

How do I tell her all of this in a few lines on a form? That he is the one that will take care of me when I’m old. That with his twinkling eyes and crooked smile, he is starting to look a lot like my long-dead father. That he is a boy beyond my wildest dreams and I have no idea how his creativity was born. That he works hard and plays hard and dreams big and oh, if you REALLY want him to do something, you need to offer him cold hard cash.

Tell her about my child? It won’t take very long for her to figure him out herself. He wears his heart on his sleeve and a few tricks up it too. And I am hoping she can love him like I do.