Last Day of School

Friday was PSP’s last day of preschool.  I’ve been waxing nostalgic lately with this being my final days of having both my chicks under my wing day in and day out.  And I’m kinda relieved to feel that way.  Truthfully,  I always thought I’d be the mom doing high kicks and backflips as I watched my kids go off to school.  But I think that was just the first-time-mom-of-a-colicky-newborn in me who used to daydream about older kids who didn’t need to be rocked to sleep, but who would go to bed when you say the words, go to bed.  Or more accurately, go to bed or you’re going to lose your treat privileges tomorrow.  Whatever.  But now we’re staring Kindergarten down in just few months and I know it’s the end of an era.  A very short era it turns out.  I’m not ready for all day, every day school and not knowing what my first born is doing every given minute and if people are treating her kindly and vice versa.  Now that it’s here, I’ll probably cry… and I’m not a crier.  And I’ll definitely be overly worried and anxious.  That’s just how I roll.

But I have a few months to ruminate on these thoughts, because as we drove away from her preschool on Friday a memory popped into my head of that almost had me in a giddy laughing fit.  It’s the memory of what I consider to be my most… lemme see…. ambitious?  stupid?  Let’s go with adventurous last day of school ever.

Allow me to take you back in time…the year was 1990.  I was in the 7th grade at Goddard Middle school in Littleton, Colorado just outside of Denver.  My best friend at the time was a girl named Amber, but I was also pretty good friends with this girl named Amy.  I didn’t think much about it at the time, but in hindsight Amy was an interesting 7th grader.  She was the girl who showed up to school one day with the bottom half of her head shaved and nary an eyebrow was raised.  She was the girl who hung out with high school kids and played poker with her mom.  She was the girl who sometimes didn’t show up to school for weeks at a time.  She was the girl who used dirty slang words, while I was too prude and too proud to let on that I had no idea what she was talking about.  If I’m painting her out to be a bad girl, she wasn’t really.  At least not the type to cause a lot of trouble or be on a first name basis with the principal.  What can I say, we got along.

To this day I have no idea who concocted this plan, but the plan was this:  Ditch the last day of school and take a bus to downtown Denver.  Hang out all day doing who knows what, then come home by the time school’s over and no one would be the wiser.  Then congratulate ourselves for being awesome.

Now I should just stop right here and tell you there is no crazy, big ending to this story.  We actually pulled it off.  As I remember it, we met in front of the school like normal.  We had told our friends what we were going to do and tried to convince more to come (there was one other girl who came with Amy and I, but for the life of me I can’t remember who it was).  When all the kids started shuffling inside we just made our way to the side of the school and ran.  Of course Amy was well versed with the bus schedule and knew exactly which bus to take and where.  I still remember waiting at the bus stop that day… we waited for a really long time.  That’s the only real hiccup I remember.  Eventually we made our way downtown to the 16th Street Mall.   We hung out, we shopped, we felt rebellious and cool.  I don’t remember what we did that day other than I bought a ring and a shirt (it was so ugly).  Eventually we snagged the bus home–I don’t remember this part at all–and made our way back to Littleton, near our middle school.  We got off the bus, high-fived and walked our separate ways.  I do remember walking home and seeing my stepdad’s car out front.  I wasn’t sure how I was going to do this since I had a shopping bag with me, but I just went inside and ran up the stairs to my room as fast as possible.  No one saw me.  In my room I smiled, silently laughed to myself and felt the rush of success.  We did it.

Like I said, nothing really happened.  It’s only in hindsight that I realize how stupid that was, how completely unsafe and stupid.  Over the summer I remember wearing the new shirt I had bought one day.  My looked at me and said, Where did you get that shirt?  

I smiled.  Downtown Denver.


When were you in Downtown Denver?

And then I told her what we had done.  Typical of my mother’s laid back parenting style she was a little shocked, and then just laughed.  I think she was actually proud of me for doing something so daring.  It’s no wonder that just a few short years later I would tell her I was going to the mountains for the weekend and instead drive all the way to Kansas.  Just trying to make my mama proud.