In truth, it's almost a good thing that I haven't been able to blog about it all because the whole experience has been so amazing to me that I probably could have written a new entry about it every day. But now I'm forced to summarize, which is probably not a bad thing. The bottom line is that he loves it and looks forward to it each day. It turns out that he left home with a pretty good foundation, and so we can't say that he is learning a whole lot with respect to academics. However, the non-academic parts of the experience are shaping him in ways that are just too numerous to name. Justin is our weird combination of free-spirited, introverted yet talkative, reserved yet rambunctious, independent yet needy for attention; and this experience is definitely allowing him to figure out how to combine all of those attributes in a way that works for both him and the world outside of home. Granted, he has been in other multi-kid structured environments away from us; but none that required any magnitude of attentiveness (think "free play") or that had any level of consistency, permanence, or intent to add value to his life.
For the first time in his life, he gets to decide all by himself who will be (and won't be) his friends. That's just one simple thing, but it's little things like that that make this so interesting to me. It's the constant thought process that he now must participate in. There's growth everyday in how he thinks, how he talks about things, how he interacts; and it's all very apparent. I'm sure it'll wear off at some point, but for 3 weeks the highlight of my day has been arriving about 20 minutes before dismissal just to hide behind the big oak tree next to the playground and simply watch him come into his own. To watch the decisions he makes, the way he interacts in our absence, and more than anything else; the simple and pure joy on his face as he runs through the yard. For every other minute in the day, I don't think I see him as anything else but "our son." Just Justin. But for those 20 minutes, he's not just our son, but an individual. A real (little) person, if that makes any sense. And it just tickles me to watch and suddenly think of him so differently. It's hard to explain, but the point is that it makes my day every time.
All along, our thought was that school would be a very temporary thing. In truth, it was never about him at all. The original objective was simply to decrease the kid-count at home from 3 to 2 for a while as Venesa adjusted to all the life changes we've made (new state, new house, new baby). But now... well, I guess we'll just have to wait and see. On the first day of school, I was glad simply to not be the parent of one of those kicking and screaming "don't leave me here" kids. But now I'm wondering if the kicking and screaming might come when we tell him that it's time to come back home.
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