Last week, Kaia’s school sent out a message to all families that a “Moving Up to Pre-K” ceremony and celebration would be happening today at school. It would include some speeches, a slideshow of the kids throughout the school year, a performance by the kids in Kaia’s 3K class, and then end with a lunch celebration with the families. Although I am familiar with preschool/Pre-K “graduations” (I myself had a preschool graduation), I didn’t realize that schools gave ceremonies for kids who were in 3K moving up to preschool. It could be a new thing — who the heck knows? It feels like a bit of a participation trophy, but I guess that could be argued for preschool, elementary, and middle school graduation, as well. All I know is that we were given about a week’s notice for this, and we were asked to contribute money for the lunch — what joy!

So Chris and I both came today. I had known that Kaia had been singing some mysterious Chinese song I didn’t recognize, and I suspected it was a “surprise” song for the performance today, so I didn’t press the teachers when they didn’t send me all the names of the Chinese songs Kaia was singing parts of at home. Our administrator gave a speech and showed a photo slideshow, followed by the main teacher of the class giving a speech (or, well, reading off a piece of paper and having zero eye contact with any of the audience), followed by two dances from the kids. One was an English song about growing up/moving to the next stage. The second dance was to a Chinese song called “Gan Xie Lao Shi” (“Thank you, teacher”). The English song and dance were really cute. The Chinese song and dance, however, totally made me tear up. I am not sure what it is about Chinese melodies or words, but this completely had me getting emotional and feeling like my baby was floating further away from me. It’s not like the Chinese song is expressing anything particularly more complex or deep than the English song. But there’s this line in the song once you translate it that says, “Thank you, teacher, for helping me grow up / Your cute smiling face will stay in my heart … You are a beautiful angel.” Everything always feels deeper and more emotional in other languages than English for me. I am not sure why. I also thought the same thing when I have seen texts translated from French or Japanese.

I still can’t believe my baby has just over a week left of 3K. Then, she has summer camp (at the same school), then it’s officially preschool in September. It’s like time just flew by so quickly. She grew these long limbs. She lost her baby fat and pudge. She can speak coherent sentences now that people other than Chris and I understand. She can use words like, “but,” “yesterday,” and “tomorrow” and know what she’s actually saying. My mom said to me on the phone the other day that I should try as much as I can to, “enjoy with her now… because soon, she will grow up and be like you… want to do her own thing.” She didn’t mean it in a mean or spiteful way; she said it in a very wistful, sad tone. My mom had it infinitely harder than me, as she managed and raised two kids, all in the midst of a demanding and demeaning mother-in-law and a pretty useless husband when it came to child-rearing and managing a household — all on top of a rigid full-time job that was fully in office. I don’t blame her for not being “there” for me as much growing up since she also worked full time. I’m lucky I can have quality time with Kaia and really enjoy our moments together. Sometimes, I still want to freeze time so I can just hold her sweet face in my hands and admire how beautiful and intelligent she is. In the slideshow, they did a photo juxtaposition of each kid the first week of 3K and then this last week — they’ve all grown and matured so much! It’s just so hard to believe it went by this quickly. I guess that’s what parenting is all about, isn’t it — watching your babies evolve into tiny humans and then big humans.