I mentioned last year that I found many “treasures” when I cleaned out some cupboards. Here is one of them—my daughter’s preschool graduation photo from May 1990.
Her preschool was part of a Catholic parochial school. She started at the “early childhood learning center” (as the preschool was formally called) when she was three months old. She began in the Infant room, progressed through Toddler 1 and Toddler 2, then into the Montessori Preschool program where she learned to read and write.
And now she was five years old and ready to graduate. Ready for kindergarten (which was just upstairs from the preschool).
Doesn’t she look proud of herself? We were certainly proud of her.
As we have been again and again in the many years since.
This was just the first of several of our daughter’s graduation celebrations. There was her 8th-grade graduation, from the same parochial grade school associated with her preschool. At the time of her 8th-grade graduation, she had been at the school for fourteen years and had seniority over all the faculty except two teachers. (There were two other students in her class who had been there since the Infant room also, but my daughter had started before them, so she had the most seniority. And she acted like it—she pretty much ran the school, or so she thought.)
Then her high school graduation. And college. And law school—that last graduation in 2010, twenty years after the preschool graduation.
I have photos of all of these momentous occasions, but this is the only photo I’ll post. My daughter doesn’t like it when I post her picture, so I try to only post photos of her long-ago childhood when she is less recognizable.
Plus, the other graduation pictures have had places of honor in our house, while this one got buried in a cupboard. I’m glad I found it.
Here’s one story about my daughter’s move into kindergarten in the fall of 1990, a few months after this photo was taken. She really looked forward to being a “big kid” and moving to the grade school on the floor above the preschool. I didn’t know this at the time, but part of the fascination with kindergarten was that she’d been told by older children that the kindergarten room had Real Dishes to play with. I didn’t let her play with Real Dishes at home—she had to stick to her plastic doll dishes.
But when she got to kindergarten, all she found was a bag of plastic dishes. Maybe they were bigger than her doll dishes, but they weren’t real. She was very disappointed. So disappointed she wrote an essay about this incident several years later when she reached middle school.
Her oral delivery of the essay won her a prize in a speech contest. We have a picture of that day also.
What long-lost photographs have you found that you treasure?
