First of all, it's okay to be walked to the door - but only on the first day. I remembered this rule the second day as my child ran off ahead of me as if the principal was handing out free candy. I followed from a distance just to make sure he reached school grounds safely, but trying to convey complete confidence in my child, I told the parents I was walking with that, "I just want to show his little brother where big brother is going." They must have bought it because the walked with me.
Second, a brown bag lunch is better than pizza day on the first days of school. When I was a kid, we had to buy tickets to buy a lunch. Now days the kids have a secret number they enter. It's a much better system. No concerns your child is going to lose the money on the way to school or spend it on something else. But not all kids are as good at remembering the code as my son. So while the cashier was looking through her book of codes to make sure each kid's account was being billed correctly, my son's lunch time was being cut shorter and shorter.
He came home that day with an appetite that frightened me. In between mouthfuls he told me he was at the end of the lunch line and every kid in front of him had forgotten their code. He managed to get a bite of his cheeseburger before the lunch time is over bell rang.
Third lesson, you can never have too much facial tissue. Maybe it's allergies or maybe it's being exposed to so many other nose pickers, but for some reason in those first days of school my boy's nose is like the Terminator. You can blow it out but it just keeps coming back again and again. With that kind of relentless tenacity, the couple of tissues I tucked into his pocket were exhausted before recess. And despite donating a couple boxes of Kleenex to the class, my son wasn't about to call attention to himself by going up to the desk to grab some. Oh no, it was so much more discrete to continually touch his nose to his short sleeve shirt. He came home looking like he walked through a paintball battlefield.
The last lesson - the alarm clock goes off earlier and earlier. That first day of school, my son was fed, dressed and polished a full hour before school started. The second day it he had a few minutes of free time before heading out. And the third day, I was almost sure he was going to be late. My wife and I were trying to adjust his bed time so he was getting up and going to bed in a cycle that was natural for him. For future reference, don't make any adjustments to sleep schedule at least for the first few weeks.
It's recommended that school agers get 10 hours of sleep - and that's actual sleep, not just time in bed. So allowing for the bed time routine, the time to fall asleep and the wake-up routine, you'll probably end up starting the night time routine about 12 hours before school starts.
It's been 30 years or so since I was in elementary school, but as this article demonstrates, I'm still learning lessons from 2nd grade.
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