Last Day of School!

The boys came home with the usual excitement of the last day of school today. Jonathan just wanted to lay in bed and shout, "It's summer!" over and over again while Ethan scampered off to play in the cul-de-sac and pilfer more flowers. While Jonathan and I went through Ethan's school papers, we came across a couple things that we love the most -- as they epitomize our son the very best. The first is the usual self portrait, identifying things that he loves to do best:

As some of you know, Ethan will sometime go through an racial identity crisis. Our child thinks he is black. We thought we had taken care of this issue once and for all. But upon looking at this portrait, we can see a definitely darker Ethan playing soccer while holding all his gold medals. What I love about this, though, is Ethan's big smile. When he played soccer, he felt the most successful and the most special than he ever has -- even though, to be quite honest, he is not the most talented. It didn't matter to him, in his mind, he was a great soccer player. I love his healthy self-esteem.

The next thing we found was his yearbook. The kids put together and filled out pages about the school year, and one of the pages was to describe their teacher:

The words he used are:

• Is awesome
• Nice
• Annoying Amazing
• Dainty
• Fastidious
• Finicky
• Particular
• Squeamish

At first we thought he had written "annoying" and even though we laughed, we thought, "Well that isn't quite nice" but then we realized he had written "amazing." I love this list of words because I think it's funny how he can spell "fastidious" but not "amazing". Also, sometimes people will just toss off, "Oh well, he's the son of English teachers..." as if that will just explain why he is so smart. But Ethan owns his own intelligence. He is a smart little boy who has worked hard, and that is all him -- not us. He might have our DNA, but he has his own will power and his own drive.

And his teacher was pretty fastidious and finicky.