Last Day of First Grade / Best Friends Day

Dear Laney,

Yesterday was your last day of first grade. Your class celebrated with a picnic at a local park, followed by a party at the splash pad of your school's playground.

It was also Best Friends Day, which is apparently a thing. I remember when people used to just be able to complain about Valentine's Day and Administrative Assistant's Day as "Hallmark Holidays," fabricated by the greeting card industry. Now there are all KINDS of pseudo holidays as manufactured by social media, like Best Friends Day and Siblings Day. Also Doughnut Day, though I have less of a complaint with that one because I can whine to your dad, "But Thooor! We NEEEED to go to Krispy Kreme. It's a holiday!!"

While you were off celebrating the last day of school, Hagen was celebrating Best Friends Day with his best friend, Finley. Hagen and Finley have deep (for 4 year-olds) discussions about philosophical topics, like magnets and stegosauruses and if a truck could change color by itself and if not, why not. They can do a 40-piece puzzle together without fussing and one of them can assemble a car building set while the other one reads the "constructions." Finley's mom, Ms. Katie, says she's worked with hundreds of preschoolers over the course of her career and has never seen anything like it. 

I told the boys I would walk them up to the splash park to see your class party, which they seemed pretty excited about. In the end, it all came down to waiting for Hagen to get his shoes on. At his former preschool, Hagen was NOTORIOUS for taking forever to get his shoes on. His teacher once told him he'd need to put on shoes if he wanted to go out to recess, and your brother said, "Then I'll just sit here because you're going to come back this way in a while, anyway." To him, it wasn't worth the effort of putting on his shoes for half an hour of outside time. Yesterday, when I got irritated and said, "Hagen - your shoes are literally the only thing keeping us from going to the playground," Finley got down on the floor and put on his shoes for him. That's the sign of a best friend. Or a super enabler. Sometimes, it's a gray area. 

We found you sitting by the splash area with your first-grade-equivalent-of-a-crush, Alex. You've been telling us most of the year that you're going to marry Alex, with his sweet demeanor and exotic allergies to peanuts and coconut oil. I spent a lot of time talking to you about what's appropriate - romantically - in the first grade, but I've since given up and just started being grateful that he seems to come from a nice family. 

The atmosphere at the spray park was wild and jubilant and you all seemed so happy to be celebrating together as rising second graders. 

Of course, you got to share it with YOUR best friend, Laila.

When we got home, you showed me a "word map" project that your teacher had done. The teachers had all the first graders describe each other, and then put the adjectives for each kid in a computer program that would make a map of the most commonly used words to describe them. The bigger the word, the more often it had been used by your fellow students to describe you. This was yours:

That "kind" was twice as large as the next word, meaning that's how most of your classmates would describe you, made me so proud I actually teared up a little.

And then your dad and I discovered this note on the bottom of your final report card:

We do not disagree. 

Happy last day, kiddo.

Love,

Mom