The Down Side of Kindergarten
I love my job. Don’t ever get me wrong about that. I love scampering off to Kindergarten every day and greeting my class’s students. I love when my special buddy comes racing towards me with a huge grin on his face. I love everything about being a SpEd paraprofessional.
The thing I don’t like is all the pee. Especially when that pee winds up on me.
Excitement is great, especially when my buddy is excited. He can be stubborn sometimes, and tired other times, and sometimes things are just all wrong for no reason at all. So when he’s psyched about things, I’m psyched. And we celebrate our triumphs with everyone: showing off stickers earned, sharing our drawings from art, giving and receiving hugs several hundred-thousand times a day.
My buddy’s been having trouble with storytime lately, which is really unusual. Especially in art class. I don’t mind being a mountain for him, but for him to climb me during storytime is inappropriate, and I know he knows it is. And I feel terrible struggling with him to face forward, to look at the pictures. It’s so frustrating because he loves art. Once we get started with projects, he happily trots along with paint, pastels, pencils, whatever. He thinks it’s wonderful (and I think it’s wonderful that he thinks it’s wonderful).
We drew robots today. He was so proud of his, and so was I. He drew it mostly himself with just some hand stabilizing support. We were both so proud, and we went and showed everyone we could find his wonderful robot. But it just so happens that art runs right up to our potty time.
I have to admit, I laughed the entire time. Even when some of his tinkle squirted onto my foot, I giggled. Because he was so giddy and happy about his robot, he could not stand still long enough to pee only in the toilet. No, we had to dance while peeing. And as most grown ups know, one should not dance while one pees. But we danced today, and giggled. And I was so proud because when he was done, he grabbed some toilet paper and helped me clean up. Not very many other six-year-olds would have helped me without any prompting. But my buddy did. And we laughed and danced the whole time.
I lied. There is no down side.
October 26th, 2009 at 4:22 am
exactly how many times in your life have you been peed on, wren roberts?
October 26th, 2009 at 9:51 am
More times than I’d care to count. And the sad thing is this is the first time in my life I’ve taken care of someone who has a legit excuse to pee on me. All the other times were drunks and crazy people.