We have an appointment to register Cole for kindergarten tomorrow. As I've been going through his registration packet, making sure we have all the right documents and that everything is filled out, I feel the same pressures as if we were putting together college applications for him. Sounds silly, but we are not guaranteed admittance into the public elementary school that our address is assigned to. Everyone seems to want to go to this school. The fact that, in years past, parents have camped out on the school lawn the night prior to registration, makes this pretty clear. This year, the school is not allowing anyone to camp out. Instead, students are chosen through a lottery. Everyone has such great things to say about this school and most of this kids in our ward primary go there. I really want Kindergarten to be a wonderful experience for Cole, as any parent would. I guess that since the picking of students is done lottery style, making the writing on the application perfectly neat and being sure none of the pages are wrinkled won't really help Cole get in. But still as I was getting his papers together, I had the slight urge to spray some perfume on them or do something to make his application stand out.
Another part of this process, the painful part, is that Cole had to get immunizations, or his "kinders" as the nurse called them, a cute name for something so heart wrenching. He and Luke both had to get immunizations that day, Luke for his 1 year appointment. I told Cole that he wasn't allowed to think about the shots until I told him he could (which I was never planning on giving him permission to do.) He's really good about following rules like this. So all morning, he wasn't allowed to think about it, on the drive to the doctor's he still wasn't allowed to think about it, and not until the nurse brought in two trays with syringes on them, was Cole unable to suppress thoughts of shots any longer. When he saw them, he began crying. We had Luke go first. Luke's screams in response to being poked 3 times were not encouraging for Cole. Two nurses were there, giving the injections, and when it was Cole's turn, a third nurse had to come in to hold crying Luke for me, so I could hold Cole who was falling to pieces. It was torture to watch Cole go through this. I just held to him as tightly as I could, and we buried our heads into each other. He kept crying out things like, "Don't do this to me, don't do this to me" and "I want to go home". As soon as the nurse said that the injections were all done, Cole immediately said through his tears, "I'm much better now, oh I'm so much better". We are both so releived that Cole never has to go through "kinders" again! And once he got his ice-cream and new Cars toy, the vaccinations were all but forgotten. Whew!
