Just How I Feel Exactly

Mothers should have personal assistants. Well, obviously. But in this case I'm not talking about all the hats we wear. Mothers should have secretaries, a person with a blank book and a pen. And this person should follow the mother around all day long and record the conversations she has with her children and the funny, delightful, Bill Cosby-worthy, please don't ever learn the correct pronunciation for that, innocently profound things that they say. I try to do it. Several times I have captured particularly delicious sentences in a journal. But so, so many have gone unrecorded.

The Papers To Keep stack for John Michael's kindergarten year reached beyond two huge Spiderman binders, and I quickly realized I really did not need to keep each paper on which they glued the little teddy bears or colored in the shapes. Now I pretty much only keep the things they create, the sentences they make up from their own head, the drawings that say so much more than words could.

This one's going in the mama hall of fame. I'd like to thank Miss King for capturing it since neither my personal assistant nor I was able to attend this momentous first day of first grade:

Caption: "On the first day of 1st grade I felt awakened."

Is that to die for? Is it the most poetic thing EVER? Yes, it is. My child, on the first day of 1st grade, felt awakened. And then, just when you're soaring to the heights of motherly glory because they are so profound and poetic and enlightened, they deliver with yet more perfect by revealing the truth behind the essay in beautifully dead-panned prose: "Yeah! I wasn't tired at ALL."

Happy, happy sigh.