First Grade

First Grade.  My son is starting First Grade today.  He breezed through Kindergarten last year and summer vacation has disappeared in the wink of an eye.  I don’t know where the time has gone.

We met my son’s first grade teacher last week.  The school holds an open house so all the kids can come and find their new classroom, meet their new teacher, and drop of their new school supplies at their desk.

Long gone are the days when I was a kid and you could show up to class on the first day with nothing but yourself and some money for your lunch.  I always insisted on wearing my new school clothes, a pair of jeans with a new top of some sort, both of which turned out to be too uncomfortable for the first day of school.  I was always hot and sweaty and sorry I’d chosen that particular outfit to wear the first day. I was always miserable in the new school shoes my mom had chosen.  They were too stiff, too formal.  I wanted Keds, or Docksides, or Vans like the other kids.  Not nerdy brown leather lace-ups with a slippery sole.

I remember coming home the first day of school and insisting that my mother HAD to take me out to get school supplies THAT.VERY.NIGHT.  I NEEDED my new Trapper Keeper notebook for the second day of school for sure.  The stores were always crowded.

Now the stores are crowded in advance.  Our local Target has a binder in the school supply aisle that contains lists of all of the needed supplies for each grade at each school in the county. I found it two months ago, surrounded by a circle of women, like a coven of witches, mumbling to themselves.  It wasn’t a spell they were casting. They were simply committing to memory as many supplies as they could from the list so they could gather the necessary items before returning again to elbow their way in to check the list for more. More pencils, more pens, erasers, pocket folders, spiral notebooks, more glue sticks, crayons, scissors.

We went to the school and we met Snag’s first grade teacher, found his desk, his locker. We went back to his Kindergarten classroom from last year to see his old teacher, let her see how much he’d grown.  She told Snags that she’d met with his first grade teacher and told her all about him.  She told her that Snags liked to eat brisket, and in the understatement of a lifetime, that he liked Star Wars.  I told her we were going to see Clone Wars that very night.  Snags was very excited.

And we did see Clone Wars.  And Snags pronounced it one of the best movies he’d ever seen.  In the very beginning of the movie some words scrolled across the screen, something like: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” and as they did so, I leaned over to Snags to read them to him.  He shushed me loudly then added angrily, “I can READ, Mom!”

I had to admit, it was true.  He can read.  He learned how in Kindergarten.  I guess he’ll learn even more in First Grade.  I hope he pays attention because there is one thing he doesn’t really know the answer to and that is this: How did Jabba the Hutt have a baby?

I pray that my son isn’t the only First Grader out there concerned about the reproduction methods of the nasty green Hutt.

“Maybe Jabba was married at one time,” I offered.

“No,” Snags said.  “That isn’t it.”

“Well, um, I don’t know then,” I said, giving up quickly and hoping he would give up too.

He didn’t.  He pondered other ways the baby Hutt may have come about:

“Maybe something grows on Jabba the Hutt and then if falls off and they put it in a jar with some chemical stuff and it turns into a baby Hutt…”

Hmmmm.  Maybe.  It’s Star Wars, after all.  But YUCK. I cringed.  I took slow, deep breaths, trying to pretend that I wasn’t having a Hutt sex talk with my six year old.  Why do these conversations ALWAYS happen to me?  And why do they always happen when I’m driving, and hit me out of the blue?

“Or maybe,” Snags continued.  “Maybe Jabba the Hutt laid eggs and they came out of the end of his tail and hatched into the baby Hutt!”

And me, shuddering: “Yeah.  That sounds possible.  But let’s not worry about that right now!  We need to think about what kind of new clothes to buy you for school. And shoes, we’ve got to get you a new pair of shoes too.”

First Grade.  Do they teach Hutt sex-ed in First Grade?  Does anybody know?