Remembering

Feb 26, 2008

My daughter is in kindergarten this year so, I’m learning about what to do as a mother of a kindergartener…which is totally new to me. It is partly because I grew up in another country so, I’m not completely familiar with the sytem. For example, I had my very first parent-teacher interview several months ago. I called to make the appointment and I got 9:00 appointment. I honestly didn’t know that interviews were held after school. So I showed up at 9:00am…oops…

Anyways, this following incident keeps coming back to me…so, I guess I must write about it. Japanese school system takes care of some of the medical things. So, we would have vision, hearing, dental exams plus height and weight checked at school–this is not that amusing although I didn’t care for them much when I was growing up. especially when I was self-conscious about my weight. no one in the class needed to know what I weighed!!! Once at a hearing exam, I got one of those big headphone thing and a little button which I was to press when I heard any sound. I was bored of being the ‘norm’, so i just pushed it whenever and didnot follow the instruction. I was asked to stay behind and almost got sent to a hearing specialist. These medical exams schools provided were very thorough. They went as far as giving annual urine samples and stool samples to figure out…what? if we had worms?? I’m not sure. Anyways, once in a while, we would receive a ‘kit’ to take home…and next day, we had to bring in the samples. For urine, we got a strong paper to fold it into a origami paper cup to catch the pee and a litltle plastic container which resembled a soy sauce container from take-out sushi place to put the urine in, and a little paper bag with your name on it. For stool samples, we would get a little blue plastic circle and a rubber band…we would collect the sample and wrap it in the plastic and tie it with rubber band and put it in the paper bag provided. What is so amusing is that on the morning of collection the entire school would bring the samples. That’s over a thousand kids. I remember a large plastic bag hanging by our classroom door where we were to deposit the samples and I remember the smell. I also remember my mom tying the bag with my samples on the outside of my backpack because she didn’t want to stink up my books…

I’m getting nauseated thinking about this right now. I didn’t know what caused me to remember this particular incident but I’m glad this part of my life is in the past. I can handle the embarrasement of showing up at interview at a wrong time way better than having to send my kids to school with stool samples, I think. Sorry to gross you out, but I thought some of you may find this amusing…