What better way to celebrate finishing up homeschool kindergarten than with a spontaneous trip to the beach?
But before we get to the beach part, how about that oddly specific "homeschool kindergarten" part . . .
I say homeschool kindergarten because, unfortunately, the private school prerequisites for first grade are slightly different than I’d expect the homeschool prerequisites to be.
You learn something new every day, some of them not as nice as others.
I have a PSA for any other first-time school parents who want to homeschool their kindergartener before enrolling him in a private school. One, said kindergartener has to have their sixth birthday before the cut-off date of September 1st. I didn’t know that. Alec turns six a few weeks after that cut-off. And two, said kindergartener also has to know how to read BEFORE entering first grade.
Before.
Before.
Things have certainly changed since I was in first grade learning literally everything for the very first time. Of all the things I took extra care to drill Alec in before his placement test, reading well was not one of them. Everything I'd seen online and knew from my own experience both as a student and as a teacher's aide said that while a child might enter first grade knowing how to read, they also might not, and both were acceptable, especially depending on the age and gender of the child.
Whatever the case, we told Alec he did a great job with homeschool kindergarten but that the new school wanted him to do their kindergarten as well.
I’d been really looking forward to the end of Alec’s school year and wanted to make it special and fun, but hearing that he’d have to do kindergarten all over again was such a blow that we went home and abruptly called our homeschool kindergarten finished even though he still had a couple weeks left.
Kind of hard to feel like making anything special and fun in that moment.
But a few days later, we had the idea to surprise the boys with a quick trip to the beach after church on Sunday, and surprise them we did. They had no idea what we were doing till l accidentally spilled the beans on the way there.
They were properly thrilled and maybe a little disbelieving. Usually they go a bit nuts just waiting for such events, and this time they only had to wait as long as it took to finish driving there. 🙂
Here's my little kindergartener himself.
We went to Cape Kiwanda in Pacific City. We're always trying to go to beaches you can drive on, but the beach access for vehicles was closed this time.
Emmett wasn't entirely sure about the sand at first, but he was soon playing so happily that any time he got disturbed or picked up, he got very angry. 
Little boy, big dune.
You can't tell it from this picture, but Sebastian was just there for the digging. As soon as he heard we were going to the beach, he made sure I'd brought all the appropriate construction equipment along. 
There's just something so cute about a baby at the beach. I took way too many pictures of him.
Eric and the big boys headed up the sand dune, and I grabbed Emmett to go along, but he got so upset he cried and cried even when he got down to play on the way up. So I took him back down while Eric and the boys kept going.
They made it to the top!
It was such a gorgeous day. The weather was warmer than the weather app had said it would be, which is always kind of surprising at the Oregon coast.
Of course we finished up with ice cream cones. The boys picked the most unimaginative ice cream available, strawberry for Alec and chocolate for Sebastian.
Bring on summer. May it be very warm and very long.
(Cause I'm not ready to send that biggest boy off to school just yet.)
