Lunch Box In Hindsight

It's only fair that I explain my son's lunchbox graffiti, instead of simply transcribing it. I was furious when I discovered it last Friday and blogged about it immediately after, before my breath had evened out.

The Lawyer goes to a K throught 8 school where the lunch break is broken up among grades. Simple enough, right? In an attempt to curb ant problems in the classrooms, teachers ask students to leave their lunch boxes outside. Based on the decent penmanship of the angry child or child on a dare that wrote that eery message on my son's stuff, I assume it was the work of an upper grade kid, probably from the 6-7-8 grade split.

My son briefly glanced the grafitti, enough to recognize the words "kill" and "fucker" and "fuck you." When he asked why someone would write that, I told him that teenagers don't have the best judgement, that they don't always make good choices and sometimes they are downright DUMB. I also told him that I had long washed his name out of his lunchbox from wiping it down daily, so it's likely that no one knew the lunchbox was his. I told him we'd show it to his teacher and deal with it from there.

From now on, The Lawyer is strictly a brown bag lunch kind of kid.

This doesn't have to be a massive deal unless we make it one. However, I think it's important that the lunch/recess teachers keep tabs on the lunch boxes, so no other kids, especially kindergarten kids, find four-letter word messages before their parents do. Furthermore, as my writer-mama friend said, the lunch boxes should be better supervised in case some twisted teenager decides to "put something" in someone's food (drugs, poison, etc.). Scary, I know. Possible, I'm positive.

Kindergarten Graffiti

I found this written in pencil on my son's lunch box:

"I'll be back for you.

You will suffer.

I'll kill you.

Your mom is going to die.

Fuck you."

Welcome to kindergarten 2007.

The Birds and Bees (and Flowers Too)

For a week the Lawyer refused to practice for his school's end-of-the-year dance performance until his teacher agreed to let him play a bee, not a flower. He stood his ground for five school days, refusing to take part with the other flowers until he got his way. Unbelievable. And this is only kindergarten. What stunts will he pull in junior high and high school?

The Lawyer's realization that perhaps being a dancing flower isn't the most macho role for a boy to play surprised me. He's only six. I suppose this is the age when gender really starts to count for something.

"Boys, they don't make good flowers," he informed me, crossing his arms for added authority. "Flowers are too girly. Bees, now that's what boys are good at being. Bees sting. They're brave."

I see. Somehow it's tougher and more boyish to play a buzzing drone who caters to the queen bee, allowing her demand him around at her beck and call, right?

"'You really want to be a flower?" I asked him on the way home from an urgent flower vs. bee meeting with his concerned teachers. "Go ahead and be a flower. Who cares what the other boys think!" Next I thoroughly bored him with my sheep vs. shepherd speech. I think he stopped listening at my first bleet.

"At first I thought I wanted to be a flower but then my guy friends laughed at me," The Lawyer said. "They said it's cooler to be a bee."

Who cares? Well, he does, that's who. And he's the one who has to perform in front of all the other kids in his school, from his fellow kindergartners all the way up to the eighth graders. Not to mention all the factulty, parents, siblings and extended family. Truth is, I would've cared at that age too. Hell, I still care too much what everyone thinks. Maybe that's where he gets it from.

All this talk about "coolness" and flora versus fauna has me pondering peer pressure, gender stereotypes and our first introductions to both.

What if we told boys it's okay to cry and girls it's okay not to be pretty? What if we told our children that other peoples' opinions of them mean nothing in the end?

I wish I had time to delve deeper into these cans of worms. This post isn't even a surface scratch but you get the idea.

Would you let your son be a dancing flower if he wanted to be one?

When and how did you first realized that boys are "supposed" to act and look a certain way, and girls another? What was your first encounter with peer pressure? How did you react?

Huffing 101 - Kindergarten Style

My son tells me kids are "getting high" sniffing glue at school. He also told me all about sex, as eagerly explained to him by a classmate. He is in KINDERGARTEN. I guess what they say about KGOY (Kids Growing Older Younger) is true.

Time to dust off my mushy parent-kid "talk" skills. The petrified egg "This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs," probably won't cut it with my overly informed Lawyer/son. It sure didn't work on this child of the 80s.

Anyone else with kindergartners in this same predicament?

... Yet another reason to feel kinship with the Polish man who Rip Van Winkled for 19 years and woke up shocked at the state of the world.