Mothers day just became extra special for me this year.
For the last three years, I’ve added the second Sunday of May as the third highest ranking day for me to get text messages from everyone simply because…I’m now a Mom!!!!
Sweet, yes, but nothing ever prepared me for what was to come this year.
In April, I had sent Kai into a school readiness program (yes, I finally succumbed to peer and hubby pressure to let my son learn English and go to school very early!). My peg is still my own growth (and those of my peers, you know who you are!) where I played and played until I was 6 and was finally eager to go to school then. I knew how to count and write my full name in both print and script (thanks to my retired teacher-Mom), and I learned words from the combined efforts of Sesame Street (which I saw twice a day) and The Electric Company.
But, heck, kids these days are getting smarter in each passing year! Even my own little Kai knows how to open and close my laptop (and he can switch from PC use to Macbook, too!), operate it with or without a mouse and open document files where he can type a letter and recite what it is (from right t left nga lang) afterwards.
I planned to bring him with me and my Burnett family to Bali in April mainly because I could not bear the thought of being away from him for nearly a week! So we did a crash course on readiness, crammed sessions of expanding his little world of Yaya, Daddy and me to some authority and peers. And am proud to say he was never one of those monster kids during first day of school that gets into a wild bawling fit when left alone in the classroom. He was eager to go to his one-hour sessions, and equally eager to go home and tell me (or Lolo/Lola etc) about his session.Post Bali, we continued with his readiness program, this time, in a much better school where they had arts and crafts, field trips and a graduation after week number 3 to boot!
It was with Teacher Rhea that Kai unearthed his creative juices so it is an absolute joy to find out he can make better images of his doodles than his writing when one night he showed me an illustration of “Mommy” (with my long hair and a toothy smile).
The picture here was given to me a few days before Mom’s Day this year. I just arrived from Singapore Thursday night and took Friday off to bring Kai to his field trip along Marikina river (how rustic, right?). We were getting ready to leave when he handed me this long brown envelope that gave parents their progress report for the week. I had thought he forgot to throw away his used paper plate when he had an eating spree in school that week, but stopped dead on my tracks to see it was a school project for my special day. The catch in my throat was so overpowering (swear I had tears almost rolling down my eyes), I never even heard Teacher Rhea gasp in shock to see me checking out my “Mothers Day surprise” (she said she taught the kids a special reveal), but well, this was as good a time as any to get “surprised.”
Not it sits on the wall fronting my seat in the office. It does not carry any piece of paper as it should (afterall, it IS a holder) and yet, you see litter all over my place. It brings me fond thoughts of how Kai is growing up to be so thoughtful (how redundant can I get?!?) and sensitive and I sit back in wonder. As my bestfriend tells me: who would’ve thought, Grace?…”
I am certain more of these will pile up in my place at work and at home as the years pass by. And I will only be too happy to keep all of them (though Max surely wont.)
Comments
Post a Comment