apparently

Today was the last day of first grade for my daughter, which has turned into the sad end of a bittersweet week. On the one hand, she and I and the whole family and indeed anyone that interacts with us on a regular basis will benefit from our ability to let go of our rush and drift awake, drift through breakfast, and drift outside into the lovely world begging to teach us things not found in school books.

On the other hand, she will miss a teacher of transcendent greatness, who wove positive enthusiasm into academic achievement, and capped it off with an excellent society of first graders. (My daughter's birthday is towards the end of the school year, so at her birthday party we always have the fascinating pleasure of seeing our daughter and her class mates playing after they've become a cohesive unit.)

In celebration of this transition, the rules about TV have given way to asking, "Why not?" Even our strict morning routine has become lax (with a series of faster and faster runs to school to compensate). This morning, we slipped to driving her to school, with not even the pretense of an errand to run immediately following. It just seemed right to show the end of our long struggle to meet the expectations of first grade. And hey, she asked to drive (showing her uncanny ability to know just when I'm ripe for breaking the rules.)

(I can't really believe how dreary I make the school year sound, but let me tell you Montgomery County Public Schools starts off with very hard work. They are doing things we didn't do until much older, and doing them for long motionless hours. During the school year, we really just get through each day, rushing much of the time. Rushing to bed for those crucial hours of sleep. Rushing to school. Rushing my toddler son to get his nap before we rush back to school. Rush home for dinner, so we can rush to bed. Did we do the homework yet?)

Our toddler recently gave up his binky (pacifier), but then he also gave up his naps, so we went back to the binkies, and the naps re-appeared. Twice, we've done this sort of crazy thing (going 18 days with no binky then giving it back) that I'd swear I'd never be a part of, but he's happy. So what if he'll be using the binky when he's five?

As far as types of child care arrangements go, we've had a foot in every camp just about. Bits of one parent quitting jobs, bits of both parents working part time, bits in a nanny share, bits of dropping the kid off at day care and then racing to work so we can race back 2 minutes before they start charging extra. Bits of working from home on a conference call with a child bored of watching Kipper for the third time climbing my head. (You can imagine that I was strongly against some of these methods of child care. But as it all works out in a jumbled rush towards the future, so far none of them have ruined it all, unlike a laundry error.)

If we were forced to enunciate our ideas about what we'd be doing as parents, I'm pretty sure each one of them has been violated at some point or another. Plastic, my lord we have a lot of plastic. In a moment of weakness (or is it taking advantage of what is at hand?), I gave my son a Mentos to sit down in the car seat without arguing two days ago.

There's a few things that I'm embarrassed about, like a few playdates I won't describe, but mostly when I think that crossing some line of purity is going to ruin things, I find that it not nearly as big a deal as I thought it would be. Fine, eat ice cream at home instead of virtuously walking to the ice cream store, I think, angrily. But what could be lovelier than eating ice cream at home with my favorite people in the world?

So today we drove to school on a warm day and then watched hours of TV. It was fun! We had two dinners, without worrying about a "properly structured family dinner experience" (you must imagine that to be thought in a gruff voice of moral expertise). When my daughter was rude to adults, I just said, "She's very sad about school ending" instead of thinking of some clever way to force niceness or at least decentness out of her.

Not that I won't be frowning at some laxness or other in the upcoming days. But today was, if not fun (on account of her sadness), the right day to celebrate laxness.