Our little one started kindergarten this year and it was our first carnival at her new school. This year’s theme was traveling the world. They had a giant globe, the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, and a red phone booth from London all greeting us upon our arrival. Before I got married I had never been to any of those places. I silently marveled that now I had been fortunate enough to make all three. Our daughter got her first passport when she was around one year old. I got my first passport at 35. The school spirit shirts were cleverly designed, with the Eiffel Tower worked into the “w,” Sydney’s Opera House was inside the “o,” the “r” contained the Great Pyramids of Egypt, the “l” was fashioned from London’s Big Ben, and the Taj Mahal formed the inner part of the “d.” At the first booth you could have a color picture printed and pasted in your own passport complete with a colored lanyard. Then as you went around to each of the other booths you got to have a stamp in your passport. It was brilliant. Our little one’s favorite was the animal hospital where they picked a small stuffed animal, named them, and then bandaged them up. Ours chose a tiger whom she named Tigress and the poor thing had a lot of maladies. The first was bound with pink, of course. Fortunately Tigress must have recovered because by the end they had all fallen off. It was fun running into classmates and getting to know their parents a bit more. There were bounce houses and the playground took on a festive feel with a DJ blaring all the current hits, which the hubs remarked all sounded the same. I tuned them out until Justin Beiber’s “Despacito” came on. My daughter and I LOVE that song! It was fun to see priests and teachers all out and having a good time. They had food, snow cones for the littles, and margaritas for the grown-ups. As our girl sucked down her mixed snow cone, I thought to myself a frozen margarita is sort of like an adult mixed snow cone, and I savored it appreciatively in the heat. No one can control the weather, but I would say the temperature resembled a trip to Cairo. We were all thankful for bottles of ice cold water. Having my little girl really has brought my childhood back, and I found myself making sand art for the first time. I let my mind go and was reminded of watching the Navajo and Tibetan monks making incredibly detailed sand art; suddenly gaining a small understanding of the calmness and meditative aspect of it. The great South African anti-apartheid revolutionary Nelson Mandela said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” I am so proud and so grateful my only child gets to experience a great education from the very beginning. A world of adventure awaits.
