So here we are, propelling rapidly towards Spring Park School and Leila’s first day of school. The Yoga Moms (my very amazing woman friends I met when in prenatal yoga class  five years ago) are already planning on canceling work for the day, dropping the kids off at school, and having a long, leisurely lunch with wine and cheesecake.

But I have to admit something. I’ve signed up for home and school, paid the color pencil and crayon charge, and am planning to get some new indoor sneakers for gym class, but i’m NERVOUS. Why am I nervous? Am I nervous because she’s going into the world – faster than i can ever stop her, without looking back? Or maybe because I think she’ll be the first kindergartner to start a revolution?  Or is this about something else, that I’m thirty-one, that I’ve been married for four years, that Lei is almost five, and that I’m well …old?

What would give me the butterflies about Lei going to school? Well, part of it is that this is just the beginning. First it’s going to be her first day of kindergarten, then it will be her elementary graduation, followed by her license, the pill, and yep… university. My baby is heading off without me. Will she still need me? I have to say, she doesn’t take very well to my instructions, my scowls when she’s rude, or my ideas about her early bedtime until she’s twelve. She’s starting to protest. What’s next? Dating? Pot?

Okay. I’m breathing, and I’m trying to calm down.

I’m happy she’s going out into the world, and I’m so proud of the young, 4 and a half year old, thirty-two pound little person she is becoming. She hosts all of my defiant personality characteristics,  is strong-willed, independent and outspoken. Her wild blond hair trailing, matted, behind her as she makes up the songs that I hum later, I look at her and wonder not only where she’ll be in ten years, and a little more scarily, where I’ll be.