Educating Small People On A New Island

Once upon a time, there was a girl who thought she could do a move into a new house that had various elephantine cleaning and functioning “issues” with just her LCB to help, all while getting three small people into new educational environments, and somehow, within a week, manage to look and feel like a scaled-down version of Martha Stewart.

She was wrong.

On the up side, the kids are getting situated. The boys keep volunteering to stay on summer vacation forever and present it as if they’re only volunteering to do it to help out the family or something. You know, just in case we need them around for stuff. Not stuff like cleaning or unpacking, however. Oh, no. I inquired, just for clarification. No, they are more willing to help the family with things like building Lego structures, or with creating forts out of old packing boxes. Because, amid all the chaos of unpacking, a precariously-built box house placed in the main traffic area really just makes things much better. And more Martha Stewart-like.

My daughter, on the other hand, has embraced the structured educational world with an open heart. Currently, she’s enrolled in a half-day preschool two days a week. Yesterday, I ran a series of errands that involved approximately 16 stops (most of them relatively fruitless, no less), and she went with me for many of them. I was attempting to purchase everything from barstools for the island we have in our new kitchen (and proud we are of this new feature in our lives) to various attachments for the many things in our house that are not yet fully operational, like two of the toilets, and the dryer, and any of the lights in the entire upstairs. At one point during the drive, she said to me, “I wish I could go to school all day.” I asked her why, and she said with a sigh, “Because it’s so totally boring at home.”

My bottom jaw hung suspended for several blocks. There are many adjectives that could be used to describe our family, but when have we ever been boring, especially lately? I asked her why she thought it was so boring at home.

“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s what you told me.”

My bottom jaw hung again for several more blocks. I searched my brain for what she was referring to, and came up at first with nothing, then with more nothing, then with still more nothing, and then the ah-ha moment burst forth.

Flashback to a month ago, when she and I were sitting on the couch reading books, and as she snuggled next to me, she announced that she did not want to go to school and leave me at all this next school year.

It was a really sweet moment that I will remember fondly when she’s a preteen, when she will probably make comments to the opposite effect, but, well, hmm.

So I explained to her, using 4-year-old-friendly terms, that she needed some social interaction with her peers as well as some academic preparation for kindergarten next year, and given that we’d be brand new to our area, a designated preschool seemed the best way to reach those goals. I also explained that we would still spend most of our time together, but that, unlike during the summer, in the school year her brothers would be gone for the better part of the day every day, and she might get a little bored not being around other children at all. At the time, she appeared to agree with me only begrudgingly.

By the way, is it wrong to confess that, in addition, Mom just needs a couple of mornings a week to work without interruption lest I otherwise risk becoming one of those mothers that runs to the Piggly Wiggly in the early afternoon for some more Mommy Juice?

Hope not.

So, after we talked about it for a few moments, my daughter concluded that school will save her from complete and utter boredom. But, she decided, she only needs to be saved from it for a few hours a week.

‘Course, this may be because she’s still a little sketchy, I realized, on exactly what “boredom” is.