Ziggy's first…year…of kindergarten?

I've been…well, not amazingly consistent about first-day-of-kindergarten pictures for the children. But I have captured most of them, sweetly standing with their backbacks (we always give them a backpack for their 5th birthdays) at the front door. Surprisingly, Ziggy is the first kindergartner to start school in this new house! Teddy started in 2020 just a couple weeks before we moved here.

Of course, since my kindergartners haven't gone AWAY to school for…let's see…thirteen years now, one might question why they would need backpacks? Or to stand by the front door, for that matter? Well, I don't know. But they manage to make all kinds of use of those backpacks somehow! And the front door too!

So, although we are a few months late for the actual start of kindergarten, I made Zig go out and pose with his backpack to make sure we mark his kindergarten year with a picture! It's so fun to have him in school with us. I wasn't sure how it was going to work, honestly. He's always been such a wanderer…spending whole days outside pretending to be a "man" of some kind or other…and living in his own world. It seemed almost a shame to pull him away from that! That's mostly why I waited until he was actually "kindergarten age" based on school deadlines (i.e., age five on Sept 1st) rather than starting him last year (even though he turned five on…Sept 5th!).

This year he was turning six and it felt like the right time. We started school on his birthday and he was pretty excited, but on Day 3 we dragged him in for school from playing outside, and he yelled despairingly, “But I’m afraid I’m going to learrrrnnnnn somethiiiiiinng!!” So that wasn't the most auspicious beginning! Ha!

Luckily, I've learned a thing or two about teaching funny, wiggly, imaginative little boys over the years. I lured him in with a unit on Caves…then one on Pirates. And in the new year I'm going to hit him with Emergency Workers and he'll be hooked for life! 😄 I hope so, anyway!

What else to say about Ziggy? He loves dogs (especially huskies at the moment). He loves riding his bike. He (still) loves dressing up and "being" men. He took to reading maybe faster than any other of my kids, or at least as fast, although he's still working his way through the "100 Easy Lessons" reading book. He loves drawing, mostly Police Cars and Fire Engines, but also other surprising and interesting things. He reminds me a lot of little Sebby (in fact I just realized that I titled these pictures "seb_kindergarten_pics" in their file names!) but he's also his own man! I'm so glad he's growing up to be exactly who he is!