two weeks later

Two weeks of kindergarten later and Erin seems to be really enjoying school. She's happy at drop-off, she's smiling and always has several positive comments when I pick her up. She doesn't seem to mind that all of a sudden (unlike preschool) she's having to get up and get dressed and eat, and let's go, and no time to for playing, it's time to get to school five days a week, while her sisters get to eat breakfast in their jammies and look forward to a Tivo'd episode of Dora or Backyardigans before their day really gets underway.

Friday was Erin's first day at her new after-school program where she'll be the three afternoons that I work. Her school started two weeks before all the others in the district so the after school programs didn't start until thursday, opening day for the rest of the schools. The after-care program was full at her own elementary school so we took an opening at the school just around the corner from our house and spent months mulling over how we'd get Erin from her school to the after program those three days. There is a school-kid taxi service in town just for this type of need but trying to talk to the disorganized woman in charge of this way over-priced car service was making me age at an accelerated rate.

John considered leaving work early and working weekends to make up for it. But it turns out the best (read: least worst) solution is going to be John picking her up at 2:40, taking her the one mile to the other school and then going back to work, and then when I pick up the twins at 5:00 I'll swing by there and get Erin on the way home. It's nutty, but it was going to be nutty any way we could work it.

Erin spent an hour doing crafts at this center a couple of weeks ago when I was there filling out yet another huge stack of registration paperwork. Ah yes, I had our dentist's address and phone number this time! But John reported that on friday when they went in she was not so thrilled to be there, in another new setting, with another group of new kids to get used to. Luckily she did know one other new kindergartner, Gabriel, a long-time friend from our playgroup, and she spotted him right away and after a few minutes she joined the group for a story and John left. Erin told me she spent a lot of time playing with Gabriel and she was glad he was there. It's always hard to sort out whether a "long time" to an almost five year-old is ten minutes or two hours. But whatever.

Also last week I, um, I mean, Erin, received her first homework bookbag. Each friday she'll come home with this bag containing an assignment, a book to read, and a journal to record some information about the book which she'll have a week to complete and return. Until Erin's old enough to take responsibility for remembering to complete and return her own assignments herself I can see that this means that I essentially have weekly homework.

I haven't blogged in a while and part of the reason is I worked the past two saturdays and another reason is I repainted in the kitchen. We remodeled the kitchen last summer and I chose to replace the god-awful yellow wallpaper with a yet-to-be-determined green paint. John vetoed green. No green please. He didn't come up with an alternative color so I found what I thought would look good with our new cabinets, kind of a baked pumpkin pie color.

John's initial comment, while viewing the fresh paint on the walls a year ago was, "I never should have vetoed green." So I got five test colors to try and settled on this one and a year later, my initial vision is completed, I think. I've now spent so much time looking at greens that I got overloaded and I don't know that I picked the best color. There may be another repainting in my future, but I can live with this for now.

Before:

After:

And I've decided to continue the green into the family room, adjacent to the kitchen because there really is no good way to color transition between the rooms.