It Procreates in the Dark

Wednesday was the last day for my little ones at school. I will write about that soon because it was an awesome day that was so much fun and so bitter-sweet. They are ready to go take on the world, or at least 4-year-old preschool. However, in their wake they have left a year’s worth of stuff that had to be sorted, cleaned, and packed for the great migration northward. We are being relocated to a new school for next year and so every single item that we want to appear at the new school (or that we really hope to see again some day) must be boxed or tagged clearly with our program name and destination. We are taking bets on how many items are lost or “misplaced” in the great migration. So the packing began. Let me rephrase that to make it more accurate. So I began packing. And I continued packing. And packing, and packing, and packing. I ran around like some deranged person with OCD writing my label (preschool new school) on EVERYTHING that I could get my hands on that was too big to fit into a box – shelves, chairs, our huge and HEAVY wooden kitchen center, our swing frame, the changing table, and I think I may have labeled a few people who stood in one place too long. Then I began to try to fit everything into boxes and sort everything and figure out just what the heck we really had and needed. The classroom next to us benefited greatly because we had a lot of things that were totally bizarre for a preschool program – like materials for teaching fractions and the concept of mathematical equality. Um, okay, we will get to that as soon as my children understand the concepts of numbers and can count to ten. We also had board games that were a little too demanding – like Chutes and Ladders (our attention span ranges from nothing to nada to zilch) and this weird one where it was like memory but with random cards that did not match anything and with a board you had to move around (sure, we can follow all those rules, right after we learn not to pull the fire alarm). We had a lot of weird stuff like that. We also had things that I did not know we had in strange boxes hidden away in the closet. I think that over the year toys snuck away to the dark corners of the closet and procreated to make new toy hybrids and clones because I have no idea where all this came from. Once it was finally all sorted, packed, and stacked I was amazed. Where did we keep all of this? How did we have room for anything else – like children? And where on earth will I put it all next year? And might I mention again that I packed 99% of the entire classroom even though I worked with 3 other people in the same room? Go Team! I thought of many creative uses for the packing tape I wore like a bracelet and many interesting places to store toys but kept them to myself. Next year when I unpack, there will be a stern lecture about safe closet behavior and perhaps a video presentation before I shut the door lest the toys become frisky in the dark and I end up in this situation again!