Milestones...

Today is Chubbocks's last day in nursery. The next time he goes to his school, he'll be a Kinder-gartener. I can't believe how fast the year has gone by. It seems like yesterday that we sent him off to school, a boy who looked way too little to be going off to spend half his day in a structured environment.

I still remember his playschool days, where he started out as a shy little thing who would rarely participate, to begin with, but sit back and relish each and every activity intensely. Then by and by he came out of his shell and began talking and contributing...until, towards the end of his first term, during the music sessions, all the other mothers and teachers would groan in advance, knowing he was going to request for his favourite Monkey song again!

He goes off so confidently to school now, and has been begging me to let him go by bus like many of his friends, instead of by car. The same boy who, when shifted from Jimmy's class to one where the parent did not accompany the child, spent the entire first month crying heart-rendingly and ceaselessly. It used to tear me apart to sit outside the classroom and hear him screaming, "I want mamma...", his voice breaking. After a month of this, where we tried all options, from me dropping him off to his dad dropping him off to the maid dropping him off and sitting outside, we finally decided we couldn't take it and moved him back to Jimmy's class for another term, using the rest of the 2 months there to slowly habituate him to the concept of not having a parent in class. Even when he made the shift, for the first couple of weeks we had to make his maid stay outside the classroom just in case, so he could come out and come home whenever he wanted to.

This was the shy kid who hated performing in playschool and used to hang about at the back of his class whenever they put on a show. Once he started crying after a show because A had to leave for office and all his teachers thought I had been scolding him for not performing! I'm not sure they ever believed my explanation. And today, this kid is one of the most confident performers on stage. Whether he is making music with beans in a plastic jar, being a roaring lion in a circus or singing at the top of his sweet little voice, he's absolutely at home on stage and looks like he's having the time of his life up there. His teachers often point him out to each other while he's on stage, because his enthusiasm is so evident.

The phonetic method they were teaching at playschool and continued at big school have paid off. Yesterday he read aloud the headline of the cover story in the latest India Today magazine in seconds. This morning he wrote out a series of words on his doodlepad just because he wanted to see how they looked, and got most of them correct. Of course, there are times when the phonetic method creates peculiar scenarios - like when he proudly informed us that we were reading the Mint luun-jee one Saturday morning. But he's managed to read an entire book about lions by himself, even managing long words like 'dangerous'.

It's amazing to see how far he's come in just one year, and it's encouraging and a bit scary to think about the changes this next year will bring with it. Each time he does something independently, I feel a thrill of pride and a pang of separation. As he keeps growing and learning, I thoroughly enjoy his company all the more and yet wish he would remain my baby for a little longer. Ah, well, at least he's still only five.