Prima's soi-disant Moving Up Day. I watched it with very different emotions from her kindergarten ceremony; I remember spending a lot of that ceremony counting how many times the kids in self-contained got their pictures in the slide show versus the kids whose moms were PTA honchos; when I compared notes later with a friend, turns out she was doing the same thing. Felt irritable and bittersweet that time: my child was not like everyone else's child; my worries for elementary school were not others'. I'd had to fight to get her into a mainstream placement and worried about how she'd adjust; her self-contained teacher had fought me on the placement and gave me negative reports about Prima's progress as a mainstreamed visitor (once a week she'd go into another class for about an hour; unsurprisingly, she was uncomfortable and wanted to go back to her "real" class).

This time, I still noticed that whose kids were spotlighted, but it was a much less ambivalent feeling about her specifically, her present and future in the school system. One sad thought only, that there were two who should have sat beside me.