Mortified.

Wow! That sums up my last week. Wow!

Morgan starts Kindergarten on August 12th so we have been busy getting ready and running around.

Tuesday night was her orientation. It went very well. She clung to my arm when we first entered the room but after being greeted by her new teacher and looking around some, she started to relax. Her teacher, Ms D, seems really nice. She's what you think of when you picture a stereotypical Kindergarten teacher: young (this is her third year teaching), petite, pretty, and really sweet. Morgan warmed up even more when she saw Roan from her current school. She will have a total of two kids from her current school in class with her.

We had to drop off her school supplies at orientation. All of the kids share supplies so they were placed into one big pile. She was fine with this except for her pencils. She wanted to bring home her special pencils (she had cat and dog ones) and bring back plain pencils to share. So she placed all her items expect the pencils into the community pile.

The room is wonderful. It's such a difference from the mediocre place she attends now. I really don't understand why people would pay more to send their kids to the corporately run place instead of here. The room is colorful, well organized, clean and up-to-date. Miss D. has the coolest reading area with comfortable cushions and books organized by Fairy Tales, Dr. Seuss, Animals, Space, you name it. Being an avid reader, Morgan was very impressed.

After orientation I was wishing that I could go back to Kindergarten. She is going to have such a good time while learning so much. Morgan was excited, even stating that she wanted to start tomorrow and not wait until next week.

The future looked bright. Little did I know a HUGE storm cloud was lurking on the horizon.

Thursday was assessment day. I didn't want Morgan to be scared or overwhelmed so I simply told her she was going to meet with Ms. D and Ms. D was going to talk to her and ask her some questions to help her figure out how she can better teach Morgan.

We pull into the parking lot and the drama begins. Morgan drops to the ground and starts howling that she must be carried. I explain that she must walk into the school. The howls increase. Mark stays behind while I go in to let them know we are going to be late. I wait at the front door for Mark and Morgan. And wait. And wait. She finally comes in, walking on her own accord. We get to the classroom and she has a death grip on my arm. She buried her head into the small of my back and refuses to look or speak to Ms. D. I try to get her off me, to at least get her head up. I'm maneuvering around the room and she's throwing herself on me like I'm the last life-raft on the Titanic. I sit in a seat and she throws herself over my lap, head hanging down and proceeds to wrap her arms around the legs of the chair. She is unmovable.

Mark and I are mortified and at a lost on how to handle this. It's the teachers turf so we don't want to step on her toes, yet we don't want to be the parents that don't try to control their kids. What do you do?

I tell her I'm going to the bathroom, hoping she will behave better if I'm out of the room. I come back and she has now glued herself to Mark and his chair. After 15-20 minutes of coaxing, Ms. D gets Morgan to agree to see the playground with us. All three of us go outside and Morgan is finally making contacting with the teacher.

Unfortunately, the girl we bring back inside is now the complete polar opposite of the one who went out. She takes hyper to a whole new level, running around the room, tagging the teacher, dumping things on the floor. I have NEVER seen her behavior this extreme before. Ms. D finally gets her to sit in a chair and asks her to count some Lego for her. Morgan does it in baby talk, she randomly calls out number and then she throws the Lego at the teacher. OMG! At this point I'm thinking the teacher is going to recommend we wait a year. Who is this animal we decided to try and pass as a child?

Ms. D sticks to it though and proceeds to ask Morgan to get a pencil and write her name. Morgan grabs a crayon instead and starts laughing hysterically. This is not going well and I want to crawl into a hole. Finally, Morgan does what she is told. Then Ms. D asks her if she can write anything else. Morgan writes Moo. Ms. D asks her if she can tell her what she wrote. Morgan replies by furiously shaking her head, whipping her hair back and forth across her face. Then Ms. D asks her what else she can write. Morgan writes mom, dad, and cat. Things are going better. She's settling down and concentrating. Then she write dog, only she writes dgo. Ms. D asks her if that's dog. Morgan takes a look at it, flips the pencil over, erases the g and the o and writed the correct order. She's become her normal self again.

The next assessment is her letter. Ms. D gives her a sheet with random letters on it and asks Morgan to tell her each one. Morgan's focused and she's answering with her normal voice. The first set of letters where all upper case letter, she then has her tell her the lower case letters. Morgan catchs this and makes a comment. Whew, she's proving that she does indeed understand things.

The final assessment was repeating back 12 sentence that Ms. D reads out loud. By now she was completely calm and focused. So we got there. It just wasn't pretty.

When we got home we had a LONG talk about her behavior and how it wasn't acceptable. She seemed to understand, but I'm still scared to death about Wednesday. I hope we both survive.