new year, new school

School started nearly two weeks ago and I haven't posted anything about it sooner because I felt like I didn't have any good pictures to show here. I've even brought my camera to school on two or three other days, attempting to get photos of the girls in line for class or coming out of class or something, but what I took didn't turn out well and most opportunities were missed because as I stood waiting for the moment I wanted to capture someone always came up to me and started a conversation. Ah well.

The new school is in the neighborhood of our new house. It's about the same size as their old school and has a similar-ish academic reputation, generally, meaning both schools have "really good" test scores. Their old school tests higher, but then only two other schools in the state ever manage to test as high as their old school and there's more to life than that. This school has a great reputation also, academically and otherwise. But this school doesn't sevral things that the kids are used to: grade combo classes, classes grouped into villages, or team teaching. Kate and Allison are in totally separate classes and can see each other at recess and lunch, but that's about it.

The girls picked their first day of school outfits, but they didn't choose anything particularly special, or new to wear. Allison wasn't looking forward to this next adventure. Kate wasn't either, though it wasn't so outwardly apparent. Of all of them, I would have expected Erin to be the most upset because she is really getting gypped in this move. The 4/5 classes at the old school get all kinds of special privileges. They are in their own section of the school, they do more extensive, even overnight field trips, they visit Washington DC during spring break in 5th grade, they have various mentoring and leadership opportunities with the younger kids.
4/5 grade here doesn't stand out so much.


Unlike their last school, everyone lives nearby and biking or walking to school is common. Their old school didn't even have bike racks. They've asked repeatedly to be able to bike to school once we move. I think that's a great idea.



My observations are that the parents are VERY organized about...everything. And they are serious about fundraising for their school. And everyone knows everyone, as I discovered at the parent social after the kids were off to class that first day, which meant everyone knew right away that they didn't know me. Many of them set out to change that right away. This was all an entirely different experience for me.

I've met a lot of nice parents so far, and many of them are neighbors on our street or our cross-street or the next block or two over. They not only know the street where our house is, they know OUR house.
"Oh yes, the construction across from Jill, next to Marion."
Those families don't even have kids at the school, by the way, but they know them anyway.
"We live not even two minutes away, you'll have to have the girls come by to play when you move."
I don't know how many times I've heard that, again, totally different from the experience at our old school and our old neighborhood.

The lower grades get out a half hour earlier than the upper two grades, so I picked up K&A and we discussed their first day while we waited for Erin. They took a school tour and seemed to know their way around just fine already. They each liked their teacher, and I asked them, "You see, this will be a great school for you, won't it?"

"NO!!!" they answered in unison.

penguins no more

Countdown to the end of the school year was pretty busy, as usual. There were all sorts of extra things going on at school for the kids and any foolish volunteer parents.

The librarian asked for parents to come in and help her on one particular day. I showed up and observed about 10 moms repairing bindings and taping together ripped pages and relabeling books with their shelving numbers and such. The librarian looked up at me and said, very enthusiastically, "Hi, can you please take all the books on this whole half of the library and move them one shelf over to the left? Yeah, thanks so much."
I cut my library volunteering plan WAY short that day.

Later there was a potluck brunch for all the school volunteers put together by the teachers, which was nice. And second-to-last week of school I attended a field trip to the zoo with Kate's class. She was happy to have Jake and Tiffany in her group with me.




My troops visiting "Penguin Island", which kept them laughing constantly. The penguin is their school mascot, and Penguin Island is the name of one of the playgrounds at school. They lingered here for quite a while.


We had a great day at the zoo. I carried their lunches in a pack with me and we were able to wander the zoo and stop when we wanted and where we wanted for a lunch break. We met up with classmates here and there and saw Allison with her group a couple of times as well.

On the second-to-last day of school I attended a field trip to a technology museum with Erin's class and my group consisted of 6 girls. We watched a really spectacular Imax movie and the kids had fun with the various hands-on displays, but I hardly had a chance to observe or try out anything myself. The 6 of them never wanted to do the exact same thing at the same time and keeping track of my particular 6 girls with blue shirts and (except for Erin) black hair among SO many others was fairly exhausting.




Then came the very last day of school, which fell on one of my usual volunteering days. The first graders in the twins' village made these silhouettes with a little poem about themselves on each, and they took turns reading their poem to the class.




Later on the whole school gathered for a sing-along outside, with one teacher playing piano, one on guitar, and Erin's teacher and Allison's teacher leading the singing as usual.


And then some tying up loose ends in the classes and packing for home every single thing possible, and then the many goodbyes began. Erin's been at the school for four years and it wasn't the usual waving as you walk past knowing that you'll see these people again after the usual short six-week summer break.


Though I think I was really in denial about it at first, our kids being minorities in school created a whole bunch of strange situations. Though doing so was optional, for the fall we've enrolled them at the school near the new house which is ethnically much more "diverse".

The school principal has an open meeting with parents once a month, called the Parent-Principal exchange. They always took place in the morning shortly after school starts and I've attended several. There is typically between 5 and 15 parents there, more at the beginning of the school year and then it kind of drops off. At one meeting when Erin was in first grade, there were 5 other parents there, all Caucasian, which is an extraordinarily strange coincidence given that there are only about 20 white kids out of 525+ kids in the whole school. Our principal is Caucasian too. Surprised, we all kind of looked around at each other, and after a general question or two everyone launched into all the problems their kids have faced by being white and that became the whole discussion for the next 45 minutes. At the time, I didn't have much to say because I was still in my denial phase and there was nothing specific going on with Erin that I knew of, or at least acknowledged. By the next school year when the twins were there too and I was on campus much more often, I snapped out of it and a few months later we were house shopping.

We hope that their social life will improve and there will be more than 1 or 2 kids that they'll get to see outside of school. People I know whose kids go to the other school tell me how great and social and close-knit everyone is. I've visited the classrooms there, had a meeting with the principal, and talked to lots of people about the new school to help me make this transfer decision.

I'm convinced that overall this is the right thing to do, but I still felt pretty bad on that last school day. We literally won the lottery to get Erin into their old school and only 1 in 8 families get a spot. It has such a fabulous curriculum and atmosphere and philosophy and there is a whole laundry list of unique things that I really like and that drew me to apply for this school in the first place, which we won't have at the new school. It's been hard to think about all that the kids will be certainly leaving in hopes of something else I hope they'll gain. I hope I'm right.



The new school's mascot is the tigers. For a long while I think we're going to feel like penguins inside of tiger suits.

spring pile-up

School's almost out, which means my calendar is overflowing with things to do. Everything seems to happen in May and early June.
The twins finished their softball season and I really came to like this new league. The coaching was a lot better and the league overall is better organized.

The girls really enjoyed themselves this season, as if you couldn't tell.


They received trophies and the t-shirts in the brightest possible color after their last game, and then the team went out for a pizza party.



I caught most of their game but missed the party because Erin and I had to be somewhere else. Weekends rarely have only one item per day going on anymore. I joined a band comprised of many of my friends from my college band, as well as many from the UC Berkeley Cal Band and Stanford Band. We had a gig to play at a festival in another town, so Erin and I headed there.

The girls had open house at school recently, where we have time to visit each of their classes and view a lot of their work, mainly larger in-class projects that they've spent many weeks on. Erin showed us her animal research report that she and a partner completed.


There was lots of pointing out examples of her work for John, who hadn't seen it before. I, on the other hand, have seen everything already. I've either prepped the materials, worked with the kids in class on these projects, put them on display in the classroom, or sometimes all three. So I always hung back and took pictures while the kids explained these projects to John.


Erin's Sandwich book report, which she chose to do as a hamburger. Each layer of the sandwich has a different component of the book report attached to it.


Erin with her fabulous teacher, Mrs. Feldman.


The routine in Kate and Allison's classes went much the same. And the toughest part about open house is that it only lasts an hour, and we have 3 classes to visit in that time, so we really couldn't linger and chat like most other families.





Kate and Mrs. Drake



Allison and Mrs. Smithwick


The girls have been with these teachers for two years and they're each really terrific. It's sad to know the girls will be leaving these teachers in particular. Big changes are coming in the fall.

We've also had a school book fair and a K/1 sing-a-long performance (John attended and a short video may follow). Before school is out the girls have one more field trip each (and I'm chaperoning), a field day, a read-in day, and Erin has a big speech presentation. Her speech was supposed to be given last week but she was terribly sick for several days and missed school. And that WASN'T on my calendar.

beehive surprise

John's been doing quite a bit of work at our new house. A few weeks ago he was taking out the walls in the master bathroom, and discovered this:



An old, HUGE abandoned beehive in the wall. Sweet. How fun that must have been to live with. I'm convinced that the previous occupants were either both blind and deaf or drunk, or perhaps all three. Not only did they not see or pay attention to the obvious disrepair all around them, but they apparently couldn't hear the insane amount of noise that thousands of bees in their wall would have created.

Last week John mentioned the beehive once again and I asked him why he hadn't removed it yet. I figured it was long gone by then.
"I didn't want to destroy it in case the kids at school want to see it," he answered.

Oh, okay, good thought I guess. I better find a way to write to someone at school and ask them without sounding like a crazy person.

I didn't have our science teacher's email address so I wrote to the twins' teachers and asked them to forward it along, admitting that this was perhaps the strangest email I'd ever written. I got a very quick answer back from the science teacher, "YES! I'd love to have it, we're talking about insects right now. Fantastic!"

So John removed the hive as carefully as he could, but managed to only keep about half of it intact. Still, that was enough to fill a good part of a huge plastic storage container, and I brought it to school. The science teacher was thrilled.

This morning John said, "I have a bunch of badly termite-chewed scrap lumber we removed too. Do you think..."

Um, sure. Load it up, I can bring that in this week.

it's so hot in november

The twins had their school play a few days ago, for which their classes have been practicing for about two months. The title was "Anasi and the Moss Covered Rock", a story about a sneaky spider in the African forest who finds a large rock covered in moss which looks out of place in the jungle. He discovers that if he says the phrase, "Oh my, what a strange moss covered rock" out loud then he falls asleep for an hour.

He decides to use this knowledge to lure other groups of animals in the vicinity of the rock so that they'll say the magic phrase, then when they fall asleep he runs back to their dens to steal any food they've been storing.Since the play involves 60 kids, the Anansi role became a group of 4 spiders who hatch this plot together.

Allison played a monkey, who aren't tricked by Anansi and friends but do see what goes on from the trees and try to warn the spiders to stop tricking the other animals.



Here is Allison and the other monkeys singing their song in the story, "What's that smell?" As in, what's that smell, I smell trouble. John told Allison he thought the mystery smell was the other stinky monkeys.


And the spiders trick one set of animals after another until they encounter some bush deer, of which Kate was one.

The bush deer watch the whole ordeal from the bushes and decide to trick the spiders right back by letting themselves get lured to the mystery rock but they won't say the magic phrase.


Instead they say, "Isn't that a weird moss covered rock," or "Isn't that a strange grass covered stone," and drive the spiders nuts until the spiders just tell the correct phrase, and the spiders fall asleep. Then the bush deer gather up all the stolen food and give it back to the other animals.




I'm at school every week and I've caught bits and pieces of rehearsals, and I helped with the backdrop, but I never did learn the ending of the play ahead of time. I had no idea that the bush deer were the big heroes in the story and I made a big deal about that to Kate, which I think she appreciated.