Memories From Kindergarten

Do you remember much from kindergarten?  I have very few memories, although the ones I do have are quite specific.  I have fewer still from pre-school, but there are some distinct moments that have stuck with me due to their impact on my life at that point.

For some reason yesterday, I sent myself an email titled, "memories from kindergarten," to remind me to do a blog post on that topic.  Today, I still have those same memories from kindergarten, but I don't remember what sparked the idea yesterday to write about it.  Alas, memory can be so fickle.

I shall not let that bother me into not writing about it, however.  To start, I may or may not remember the first day of kindergarten.  I remember the door to the classroom and I remember the teachers.  The main teacher was Mrs. Hunt.  Her assistant was Mrs. Honeycutt.  I don't know if that's how her name was spelled, but I do know I upset her one day later in the school year because I told her I could remember her name because it was "honeycutt, like your going to cut her head off."  The look on her face when I told her that made me upset, because I liked her a lot, and I didn't mean anything bad by my comment, but apparently that's not the kind of thing you say to your teachers, I gathered.

There was the bunny rabbit and the classmate who took it home for the weekend when it didn't return.  We took it in turns to keep the bunny over the weekend.  On this particular weekend the bunny got out of the cage, jumped into her pool and drowned.  Okay, wait, who has their own pool?!  Yes, that's what I thought.  I suppose we got another bunny, but that's the story I remember.

There was the day I went to the bathroom and was whistling to myself while I was in there.  I don't think my teachers knew I could whistle and when I came out they were trying to find where the whistle came from.  They almost didn't believe me when I said it was me.  It seems I had confused the whole class.

I don't remember nap time much, except that I would get in trouble because I would tie my shoes into knots and spend part of nap time chewing the laces trying to get them undone.  My teacher told me she would absolutely not untie the mess one more time if I did that again.  I remember the conversation and chewing on the laces; I don't remember if I did it again.

I vaguely remember the yard we could play in.  We had our own little yard and the only thing keeping us in was a hedge around the rectangle that abutted our classroom.  I wanted to get to the area beside our classroom because that was for the first graders.  Their toys looked exciting, only I couldn't figure out how to get through the dense hedge.

And then there was the butter making.  That was a real magic trick.  The teachers put cream into a jar and said we would each have a turn shaking it and then handing it to the next child in the circle.  When it got back around the circle, it would have turned into butter.  "Not possible," I thought, but so it was.

Kindergarten was a whole year.  How can it be that I only remember a handful of things from it?

The Big Boy Update:  About this "Poomer Power" thing he keeps on saying...I asked him yesterday what it meant.  He looked at me and said, "ask more people."  I didn't explain that I had already asked Google and even the great and powerful Google didn't know.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  She is climbing everything now.  She has taken it on of late to conquer the kitchen cabinets.  She will grab a hold of the counter top and then try to climb up using only the drawer knobs.  We've explained that the knobs don't appreciate this, but she doesn't seem to care. 

Someone Once Said:  I never learned from a man who agreed with me.