Cody's First Day of Kindergarten

Today was the day Cody has been waiting for all summer long. Today he officially became a Kindergartener! He has been looking forward to this with a combination of nerves and excitement since preschool ended in May. By this past weekend, he couldn't wait to start!

Cody got a very nice surprise on Sunday afternoon when one of his preschool teachers, Mrs. Stecklein, called him to wish him good luck on his first day. He was SO proud he got his very own phone call.

We let Cody choose our meal on Sunday evening, and he chose coffee cake! So lucky us, we all got to eat breakfast for dinner!

Unfortunately, Daddy had to go out of town on Sunday night, but he was still able to enjoy breakfast dinner with us before he left!

After baths, we decided to play some Lego Rock Band before getting ready for bed! Here's my little drummer boy, not letting his cast keep him from drumming.

Then we read a special book all about starting Kindergarten. We've read several over the last few weeks, but I'd been saving this one especially for the night before!

Jacks took this picture for me. Guess I forgot to tell him to make sure you could see ALL of us (especially the person about to BE in Kindergarten!) in the picture. LOL

Here are the boys' backpacks, all packed up and ready to go for the next morning!

We woke up almost an hour earlier this morning than we had been for the last few weeks of summer (all attempts at slowly shifting our schedules back so that the transition would be easier today were completely rejected!). But when I went upstairs, Cody was lying awake in his bed...he was ready to get up and get started!

Cody isn't a big breakfast eater (at least, not in one sitting...he likes to graze across the morning), but I managed to get him to slurp down some Carnation Instant Breakfast. He kept checking his NEW watch to see if it was time to go!

Then we headed outside to take the annual "First Day of School" pictures.

I just love that despite how tall he is, how very little (ok, almost none) of his baby-self he has left in his face, how grown-up his outfit...he is still holding on to BearBear, taking a piece of his babyhood on with him into the next stage of Big-Kid-hood. ♥

Cody was fine when we were walking into the school, but he got a bit teary when it was time for Luke and me to leave. But I peeked around the corner a minute later and he was fine, coloring at his table with another boy.

After a very long day of Lucas asking when it was time to go get his "budders," we headed up to the school to pick up Jackson and Cody. Cody had the BIGGEST smile on his face when he saw the car. It must have been cool for him to experience the carpool line from the other side!

We stopped for a celebratory snack of donuts on the way home. Cody was in pretty good spirits, he was clearly tired. Look at his face in this next picture!

Cody said everything in school was really fun. When I asked him to pick a favorite thing, he said he liked music best. He liked his teacher, Mrs. Jacobs, and he said he wished he could have bought lunch because the chicken nuggets and mashed potatoes looked good (next week, bud!). Also, he earned 3 Tiger Tickets!

He described PE as "pretending to be grapes and peaches," which I found very confusing until Jackson explained that the coaches use fruit names for their different directions (ex. 'grapes' means cluster all together around the coach). Jackson has been at this school for 3 years and this is the first I've heard of this....Anthony pointed out that we will probably learn all sorts of things about the school from Cody that Jackson (who rarely talks about his school day) never mentioned. Should be interesting!

So all in all, I think the day was a big success. Cody wasn't sure if he wanted to go back tomorrow because the days are "sooooo looooong," but hopefully he'll adjust pretty quickly. And I'll be volunteering with his class at least once a week, so I'm hopeful that will help, too.

It's hard to believe Cody's a Kindergartener! We're so proud of him, and we know he's going to have a great year.

PS. If you feel like taking a stroll down memory lane, you can check out Jackson's first day of Kindergarten HERE. (Something is a little wonky with the formatting, but it was 3 years ago...I guess Blogger has changed things up a bit!)