Already?!

It was something like a wall hitting me in the face.

My baby is going to preschool!

While I keep telling myself she still has four whole months left in her toddler room, the school , more specifically, my son’s classroom, has begun their preparations to accept new children into the room for next year. This seems too soon, I moaned to the head teacher this morning and she replied with some nonsense about the 1st and 2nd graders schedule needing to coincide with registration somewhere else for something else. And I guess this becomes an immediate trickle down effect. Get the youngest ones placed, then they will be asking me to register my oldest for kindergarten and then they can deal with their older kids that are worlds beyond my kids. Right? Worlds away, right?

Placing Skadi is an easy decision for me.

Not necessarily for AB.

As far as I am concerned she needs to go straight to her brother’s current room. I like and respect the teachers in there. They are fair, but firm and she needs the consistency and defined boundaries. Not to mention the convenience of taking both kids to the same room for a year – yippee! And all the fall picnics, Christmas parties, spring parties, pumpkin patch trips… just one set! Oh my goodness, I won’t know what to do with myself to only have to go to one set of events! Then there is the fact that she already knows the room and has interacted a fair amount with the teachers. It’s a no brainer.

Then AB reminds me, “but what about Leif? How will this impact him?” We have already, had a couple years of ups and downs with him in preschool. We have finally achieved a happy medium.

We went through the list of other options for Skadi and I have to keep reminding myself that even the “worst” rooms (by my assessment only) are far better than every other option available in our area. (Also my opinion only.)

But at the same time I remind myself I am NOT going to make the same mistake with Skadi that we did with Leif. Not that we really had control over a teacher who had been there for a decade leaving… and after finding out recently that she left due to a nasty cancer it makes me sorely regret my grumbling over it at the time.

AB’s answer is to look to Skadi’s 2nd teacher, “Ms S”. Ms S. told us from day one that Leif needed to go in the room he is in now, but we didn’t listen to her. We jumped on another room based upon our observations and really liking the head teacher, who then departed. And then later we dealt with problem after problem in this room. And then after a brutal year, moved him to his current room. My task this morning was to talk to Ms S and see where she would put Skadi.

Ms. S giggled and got in her two cents, “I TOLD you to put him in A.T., but you didn’t listen!!” she joked. I was about to offer to bow down before her and promise something, not sure what, when she whispered, “Put her in A.T. also.”

Then she and the head teacher went on to tell us that in anticipation of this they had already spoken with Leif’s teacher and that she was fine with having the siblings in her room and anticipated no problems at all.

The school offers observation times to the parents to go observe the rooms and see what they are all about. Naw, we don’t need to do this. We have a pretty good idea of what each room has to offer and who the teachers are. So as long as there is no great teacher change up, we should be golden.

Phew. One of the most stressful aspects is dealt with. It isn’t finalized, or submitted in writing yet. But it’s very nearly a done deal before the majority of her classroom has any inkling of what is hanging out there waiting for them. I love having the “been there, done that” advantage.