High Maintenance Mom

It's that special time again when those of us living in our type A communities rush around to schedule a summer's worth of activities for our kids. At $500 a week we feel nostalgic for the good old days when camp was more than a week long and kids played outside all day. N's preschool class from last year has organized a play date where we will all come with our camp research and plan our summers. Afterwards, I will send our schedule to several of B's friends to see what we can do. One of the parents I spoke with today told me of a camp where the kids are bused to a park where they can canoe. She referred to it as "Old School." In addition to preparing for camps, many of us are also scheduling school tours and going through the application process...

B started first grade on August 11 and N started his last year of preschool right after Labor Day. It's late September and we're still trying to adjust. Going to bed early is a struggle and with it comes difficulty getting up / out of the house in the morning. It's exhausting. We're trying to stick to a schedule to make life easier on everyone but it's hard to find time for soccer, homework, food shopping, cooking, and cleaning...

Now may be the time in your area to register for school next year and summer camp. I've included links below about the process we went through last year choosing and registering for kindergarten. Now that we're in kindergarten, our big surprise has been summer camp sign ups - we were previously in a program that had only five consecutive days off during the summer. We didn't realize how lucky we had been or when we needed to sign up for summer camp. After spending countless hours trying to schedule our summer and finally feeling good about it, I was surprised to receive a waitlist email the first evening of new camper registration for what I thought was our new four week day camp...

The transition to kindergarten has been a little more exhausting than I expected. Before school started I was focused on surviving B's meltdowns / regressive behavior and I didn't spend enough time thinking about how the rest of our lives would change, such as becoming a morning person so we don't have to sign in at the principal's office. It's funny because I thought I had prepared myself, but I really hadn't...

Today, February 1st, was kindergarten registration day at many schools in our area. Our district has a lottery, which may have only slightly better odds than the Powerball for certain schools, and is definitely difficult for anyone who is mathematically inclined. Friends from our pee wee tennis class, however, are at a school where being first in line counts for something. Like trying to get concert tickets many years ago, sometimes all you get for waiting in line for 20 hours is a little sympathy and a spot on the waitlist...

The Redwood City kindergarten registration period begins on February 1st at 9am. For the month of February, parents have the opportunity to sign up for any one of 13 kindergartens in the magnet system. The average median house price for Redwood City in 2006 was $767,500 with APIs (a California index of how good a school is) ranging from 643 to 887 out 1000. Not believing that people could pay that much money and not have a great school district apparently has not changed the situation for us. I'm sure the kindergarten search will be a learning process. Below is information about what to look for when visiting schools (modified from a GeoKids handout)...