Stasha’s Listicle this week calls for us to list ten things school, any ten things school… Stasha, really, you shouldn’t be giving us this much freedom!

My kids start school next week, preschool, most everyone goes to preschool in Italy so the general feeling when they’re three is the same as what you get in the US when they start kindergarten. FREEDOM! (evidently a recurring theme today.)

But, as we’re on vacation this week, enjoying the last few days at the beach under a torrential rain, I’m not really in the “back to school” mind set yet. I’ll likely be writing a tear jerking post next week about how “my baby is all growed up”, but right now I’m more concerned with ending cabin fever syndrome by taking off for the aquarium in Montecarlo. Also, and completely unrelated, yesterday I accidentally found (i.e. googled) an old high school boyfriend who had seemingly dropped off the face of the earth. This convoluted confluence of events led to the following listicle:

Boys from school

1. the first memory I have of a boy at school was in the third grade, his name was Jack and he had a crush on me, I learned of this crush because he kept asking me to chase him and then look up my skirt. Having just arrived to the US, this was all very “foreign” to me. Sadly a few days later he was shimmying up more interesting skirts than mine.

2. my first real “friend who’s a boy” was in the sixth grade, Jeremy, we went to school together all through middle and high school and are still friends to this day. At some point or another we both had a crush on the other, but the stars never aligned correctly and we never had a crush on the other at the same time (that we know of).

3. my first kiss was in the eighth grade, at school, behind the admin building. It was wet, and very quick and I ran away giggling delightedly with my best friend right after, wiping my mouth profusely on my school uniform sleeve. This is why I’m so shocked to hear of all the six graders having varied degrees of sex nowadays, this boy was my “boyfriend” for over a year and the most he saw was a boob.

4. my first boyfriend was a year younger than me, I was a sophomore and he was a freshman, though we were the same age (I was the youngest in my class by a stretch), this of course didn’t mean anything and I was called a “cradle robber” for the rest of high school. I broke up with him the summer prior to my senior year because I thought I was too mature to go out with a younger guy and he rode his bike to my house every day for weeks delivering flowers and cards. I was an idiot. I later changed my mind but he was dating a new, foreign girl, and I pined after him for my entire senior year (with much hilarity from my classmates) Incidentally, he’s the one I recently googled, he’s a neurosurgeon (typical) and, though bald, still cute.

5. my senior year I dated a series of losers, college losers, which, somehow, in retrospect, is all the worse. I was the object of a classmate’s crush, a good friend who contributed tremendously in my passing the IB exams (he’s now a classics professor at some northeastern university), and with whom I acquiesced to attend the prom. Since I was a monstrous idiot (i.e. teenager) then, I effectively ruined both his and my prom, but thankfully he hasn’t held a grudge.

I’m capping my little list at 5, because though there were other boys (of course. Like one a week who held my interest for a few days for whom I would’ve “just died”, of course… fikleness thy name is adolescent girl.) these are the most significant ones. What this little walk down memory lane has done for me today is to mostly inspire terror at what my future holds as a mother of both a boy and a girl. God help us as we embark on this new school journey, from the other side.