First Time Kindergarten Mom

What I Wish I'd Known:

Call Ahead:
When signing your child up for Kindergarten, you'll need about a hundred different papers and the website won't tell you what to bring beforehand. They'll assume everyone knows what's going on. But you won't so you'll have to drag your kids back and forth from school to home and back again trying to get everything in order. And you still won't have all the paperwork you need because you forgot where you stashed her last medical check up paperwork and she won't have had all her immunizations yet because she turns five over the summer. And everyone else you see will appear to know what they're doing and have no problems whatsoever.

Buy More:
On the huge list of school supplies, they will request that you buy approximately 16 thousand glue sticks. Buy a couple thousand more because Kindergarten homework will need glue sticks. And you'll be really frustrated that you didn't buy more and when you go to Target you won't be able to find glue sticks because all the back to school stuff is gone. You'll be able to buy Christmas ornaments in October, but it will take you ten minutes to find a glue stick among all the office supply stuff.

Don't Throw It Out:
You will finally throw out all those old magazines. And then your child will come home with an assignment to make a collage. So you'll dig the magazines out of the recycling bin and you'll cut out pictures of things that start with the letter "T." But you won't think about the fact that there are 25 more letters in the alphabet and you'll probably be making collages for each one, so when you're done with "T," you'll put the magazines back in the recycling and it will be taken to the recycling center before the next collage assignment. Just keep them. Don't throw anything out. Even toilet paper rolls because those will be needed to build a house for Hansel and Gretel at some point.

Don't Blink:
Your five-year-old will suddenly seem all grown up and responsible and will be spending so much of her day away from you. But she'll also look impossibly small as she skips into the school with her sparkly blue backpack, lunch box and pony tail swinging, and you'll want to run after her and hug her and never let her go. But you can't do that; you have to let her go. She'll come back at the end of the day with math homework that they manage to make confusing for you because of new terminology they use this year but will probably be changed by the time your next child is in Kindergarten.