If you asked me what milestone I looked forward to the most with my children, I would have not hesitated to tell you I was anxious to see the day when they became literate.  I love books.  I love reading.  I love that ideas and feelings can be beautifully conveyed through the written word.  I look forward to the day when my children pick up Yeats, or Eliot, or Whitman and see the beauty in the written word.

Kindergarten is the first step.  It's where we build the foundation of literacy and the written word.  It's where a whole future of the love of education is birthed.  It is all very exciting!

I can testify to this truth after nearly a semester of kindergarten:  I would rather give birth to Will every day for the rest of my life than have to travel this journey to literacy with him.  There are several reasons for this - the least of which is that after you have labored with childbirth the lovely nurse arrives with a narcotic and a glass of ice water.

Each evening we arrive home.  Each evening we work through letters and sight words.  Each evening I thank God that he has provided people with the patience and ability to do this as a career.  Each evening the boy and I sit down with the best intentions of becoming literate and each evening ends in a stalemate of frustration.  He knows letters, he knows the sounds.  He cannot seem to make the connection between T, H, and E to make "THE".  It's an important word.  He's going to need to know that one. 

The day Will started kindergarten, I started my Master's degree.  What this means is that while I have out my homework, he has his out.  Now that we're nearing the end of the semester the table is covered with books for my term papers and his sight word homework.

"You need to keep practicing those words" I tell him.

"I am."

"You're not.  You're doodling on the paper.  You need to learn how to read and write.  I'm reading and writing.  I've read these books, I've taken these notes, I'm writing these papers.  I'm working very hard here and you're doodling.  Look, you'll never get to the point in school I am if you don't learn those words."

He looks over at the piles of hundreds of notecards, my piles of books, he sees me wearily threading together a term paper.  He hears me turn down parties at the neighbors' homes so I can finish my papers and study for my tests.  He looks into my eyes, and because he is an expert at reasoning skills, he speaks to me from my own argument:

"That's an acceptable loss."