First Grade Friday

Summer is over. Sadness. It was a good one. I took two condensed classes through May and June so I really just had July and August off from school, but it was worth it. I’ll probably end up doing it again this summer. But thats 10 months away so we’ll see how I feel then. July and August was busy with a family trip through the Okanagon, a trip with friends up to my cabin, and other exciting events/parties. But now its September and I’m back to school and have no social life. Woot

            On our roadtrip, we discussed different memories from each grade of elementary school and were reminded how weird and awesome we are. Anyways, my memory from grade one: I definitely have a few that stand out, but the biggest memory which scarred me the most was the yogurt incident. I remember that my mom had packed me yogurt for lunch but had forgotten to pack a spoon. (NOTE: I kinda blame the following incident on my mother as this could have been avoided had I not been the middle child and forgotten/neglected for the majority of my life and she had packed me a spoon).

            Do to my excess of yogurt and lack of spoon, I had to ask my teacher if I could borrow a spoon from the teachers lounge. She left the room and came back with a spoon and I got up from my chair to meet her halfway across the room (because I aim to help others that way) to receive the spoon. As I went to sit down, the boy sitting next to me pulled my chair out from under me. I FELL to the ground, spoon clutched in hand, and my classmates laughed. This was the first time I had seen this prank pulled so I was thoroughly shocked and embarrassed that it had happened to me.

            I’m pretty sure that the only other people who remember this story other than my family. They were/are under the belief that the boy who pulled my chair out from under me was my future husband. I don’t think so, but thats the moment which stands out from grade one for me.

My grade one memory is the day a boy in my class ruined my show-and-tell day. 

First thing to note is I used to have super long hair. It usually was kept in a braid, I remember this only because I used to sit in my chair and entertain myself by trying to loop the end of the braid through the hole at the back of the seat. I looked like a moron.

Because your show-and-tell day is the third best day of the year (Christmas and your birthday being first and second...duh) my mom had helped me dress "fancy" for school. There is not much you can do to dress "fancy" when you wear a uniform so I settled with brushing my hair out so it was long and flowy like Rapunzel (happens to be my favourite fairy tale). 

So I'm at school and feeling all special and stuff, sitting at my table when all of a large chunk of my hair is missing. How I figured this out is a little fuzzy to me but all I remember is freaking out. 

Then ensued a grade one version of Law and Order. The teacher interviewed every kid around me. It was intense. The perpetrator ended up being a kid who still had the incriminating evidence on him- a pair of scissors in his back pocket with hairs stuck in it...classic.

So really this memory has nothing to do with my actual show-and-tell- which was my favourite doll, Angie, but about my traumatic experience on what was supposed to be the 3rd best day of the year for me.

There are only two things that are very vivid in my mind from first grade. 

The first is from the first day of school. I was new and slowly becoming familiar with my peers. There was one sitting at a desk next to me. Due to the severely butch haircut I could not figure out for the life of me if it was a girl or boy. Although I consider myself quite intelligent now, this has not always been the case. At the age of five my observation skills were not at their best. This child had earrings (blue ones...not all that helpful, really), but this fact did not matter at the time. It took me three or four days to finally realize that it was indeed a girl. We became friends. And I wanted to kind of be like her. So I got the butch haircut too. I don’t really understand what overcame me. My mother asked multiple times : “are you sure?” and boy was I sure. I’m not totally sure what the moral here is, but just don’t get boy haircuts if you aren’t a boy or else you will want to burn pictures of yourself from about a 6 month period. Hair doesn’t grow as fast as you think.

And my second, glorious memory is not one that I am proud of. All I’m really doing by telling you these stories is showing how incredibly stupid I was. Anyways, one of the books we read in the class was Bunnicula. I hated Bunnicula (like up there with ET and The Gremlins). In case you were never blessed with the opportunity to enjoy this tale, a brief synopsis : A family’s pet rabbit is a vegetable vampire or something, and it just drinks all the colour/juice from the vegetables in the fridge during the night. But with my fabulously creative imagination, I decided that all the animals in my house were going to get a taste for my blood and kill me in the middle of the night. I simply could not differentiate between a vegan rabbit and a homicidal cat/dog/bird (I was sure any of them were capable of ending my life). I cried. A lot. Because I was going to die soon. If it’s not obvious already, I did not get drained of blood by any of my pets, at least not enough to kill me. But I was tormented with the thought of that fate for months.