Getting The Perfect 1st Day of School Picture

If you’ve got kids, you’ve got to post the perfect first day of school picture on Facebook / Twitter/ Instagram/ Periscope.  You’re little sweety waving & smiling as they board the bus. Or blowing you a kiss thru the car window. Hanging up their backpack in the perfectly neat row of cubbies in their new classroom. And then a mom and kid pic – you smiling with your trying to look like you woke up like that make-up on, hair combed and a clean blouse and cute still-summer shorts.

As if the first day of school isn’t stressful enough!

Because this is probably the first day in almost two months that you’ve had to wake up your whole family before 8 am.  And if you are lucky enough to have high schoolers, you’ve had to get up at the break of dawn. Then you had to pack lunches, and realized that since you went to the grocery store last week, the kids ate all the snack bags of chips over the weekend and handed out the juice boxes to their friends at the pool.  And where are all those dang forms, especially the one that proves your kid got his measles shot this summer so they will let him in the school door?

You spent a mortgage payment on back-to-school clothes, but the little one refuses to wear the new outfit you picked out – the identical pink dress or red and blue striped shirt that they wear every year so that it looks so cute in the scrapbook on the “how they are growing” page. Instead, they want to wear their favorite summer movie t-shirts, so your daughter is wearing a Minion t-shirt and overalls with fake black glasses and your son is wearing a Straight Outta Compton t-shirt and jeans and won’t smile.

And they changed what time everyone goes to school this year, pushing it back 15 minutes – just enough to screw up your schedule, but not really enough time to get any sleep that makes a difference – and changed the bus routes, so you actually have to check the bus route schedule this year for the bus your kids have been riding for 6 years to figure out what time its coming.  But what mom worth her coffee puts her kids on the bus on the first day of school, so you’ve got to drive them to the door to prove to everyone that you aren't one of those free-range willy-nilly parents.

But before you load up the kids in the car, you’ve got to fix your hair and swipe on some lipstick and put on a real clothes. You cannot do the in-pajamas drop-off today because you know that other mom in your kid’s class is going to be there in an outfit that matches her kid’s, with a full face of make-up, unchipped manicure and hair fresh from the salon.  She’ll be there with that cute-sy sign she made stealing an idea from Pinterest, a chalkboard with cute-sy lettering announcing the first day of school and the new grade. (She also wrote a funny haiku for her kid’s lunchbox, you’ll hear about that from your little on after school.)

There's just enough time to pour coffee in your car mug, search for the top, get the kids to stand on the front steps and not poke each other.  Try to get a couple good shots of them smiling without making those goofy faces they usually do when you pull out a camera, but they never do when they are taking selfies.  Hurry to school and try to get towards the front of that nightmare of a drop-off circle. And before the teacher on drop-off duty blows her whistle at you, you snap a couple more pictures of the kids in front of the school before they see their friends and you get one last picture of the back of their heads as they run into the school.  Waving from the curb is the PTA President and if you make eye contact for too long, she’s going to ask you to chair the fall festival bake sale or to join the healthy food committee, so you wave, jump back in the car, and knock over your coffee onto your nice clean outfit.

Now to get home, flip through the morning pics, and find that one good picture of your lovely darlings and try to think of something new and catchy to say, but its been too hectic a morning for all that so you’ll just go with “first day of school – when did they get so big – tears” like everyone else.

Whew. Relax. Finish your coffee and clean up breakfast. In six hours, it’ll be time for the “home from the first day of school” picture.

Happy Back-to-School Day!

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How to Get Thru the Parent Homework (i.e. back-to-school paperwork)

My desk (i.e. kitchen counter) is full of papers and calendars and reminders and notices.  All stuff that has to be read and filled out and returned for school and extra-curricular activities.  With four kids in three different schools (elementary, middle and high school) there’s quite the assortment and very few duplicates.  I’ve piled it all up and will sit with a cup of coffee, my calendars, checkbook (you know that's got to be in there), envelopes, and folders and sort it all out.  It’s all part of the back-to-school parent routine.

For all the forms required for school, a copy machine and/or scanner is one of my favorite tools for trying to keep some order.  I copy everything!

• Health forms - At your kids' pediatrician appointments, ask for the school required paperwork then, especially the sports clearances, even if you think your child will never play a sport.  Make a copy and send this to school when requested; save the original at home.  This saves the trouble of going back to the pediatrician (and paying for another copy plus a rush fee) when needed.  Its also helpful to have one on hand when I need to know when was their last tetanus shot.

• Emergency forms - How many times can you write your name, address, and phone number?! If you have kids in the same school with the same forms, fill in the basics – home address, parent phone number, etc. – make copies of the form, then fill in each child’s name, teacher, other personal info on his/her copy.  Make a copy of all of them and file them away, just in case it gets "lost" (middle-schoolers especially are known to lose important papers in their backpacks). 

• Absent/tardy notes.  I have a pre-printed, fill-in absent/tardy note that I created myself, a version for each child.  Pre-printed is the child’s name, teacher’s name (for the elementary students; blank for the middle-schoolers), my name and contact information.  Then I have a check-off list of why they were absent or late, why they need to be excused early, and a blank for anything else I need to mention.  They are especially handy when we’re running late – who has time to write a note?

Dear Teacher....

And all those checks?  I probably go through a whole checkbook in the month of September - PTA dues, lunch money, early quarter field trips, payments for year-end field trips, sports uniforms, spiritwear.  I know my kids and there's no way that I can hand them a pile of checks and expect that they will get to  the correct person in the correct office.  Each check and accompanying paper goes into its own clearly marked envelope.  

Considering the mountain of paper involved in back-to-school, I do try to recycle and reduce paper uses as much as I can.  A few ways, other than putting all the stuff I don't need in the recycling bin:

• Make 2-sided copies
• Print the absent/tardy notes on the backs of unneeded documents (old flyers, notices from school, rough drafts of school assignments)
• Use those payment envelopes that come with the bills to send checks back to school
• Write any necessary responses to a note on that same paper, rather than on a separate paper

Sometime during that first week of school, I make a pile for each kid, then paperclip it, put it in an envelope or put it in their homework folder, then wish them a safe journey and assume that they will make it to the appropriate school office.

This post has been updated from a previous post I wrote a few years ago.

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I Really Did Learn All I Needed In Kindergarten

This week is Teacher Appreciation Week. If you’ve got a kid in school, you probably couldn’t miss it, with all the hoopla about celebrating your kid’s teacher.  And, don’t get me wrong, it’s all well-deserved. I mean, sure, we parents got them through the ABCs and how to count to ten (and the over-achieving parents made it to 100) but spelling, explaining why “rough” and “through” do not rhyme, when to use a comma, carrying the 1 (though it’s not called that anymore) and long division?  And then the harder stuff like chemical equations, ancient world history, and math involving area under a curve?  Yeah, home-schooling is not an option for the sanity of this household.  Summer workbooks and homework is about our limit. So 

THANK YOU! to my kids’ teachers.

During this week, I came across my kindergarten report card. Wow. What a difference some years make in the expectations of our kids.  I actually was evaluated on properly using scissors and my ability to skip and hop.  These are such important skills for life!  I don’t hop much these days, but I might skip a little bit more than a woman my age is expected to and I definitely use scissors a lot.

Here’s a few other life lessons I learned in Kindergarten.

• I claim only my share of attention.  Obviously, I was in the pre-selfie and reality show generation.
• I enjoy books, stories, and poems. This has never changed, thank goodness.  As well, this is  crucial for a writer.
• I take care of my personal needs.  I need to do that a little bit more these days and make myself a priority.  Not all the time, but sometimes us moms need to remember to put ourselves first.
• I express myself with art materials.  The hundreds of skeins of yarn and shelves of craft materials is proof that’s still a key part of my life.
• I am courteous and considerate of others. I do my best.

On the explanation of the report card to parents, it notes that “kindergarten introduces [students] to school as a happy place.”  I know school has changed a lot since knowing your colors was considered an accomplishment for 5-year olds, but I do like to think that children can look to their school as their happy place. And thank you to the teachers that make it so.

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Should Kids Get Vacation Days?

How many times have you thought, "wow, look at that sale on plane fares, we could go on a great vacation! Oh, but dang - there's that whole kids have to go to school thing." It's pretty much a rule: when schools are open, kids are supposed to go. In our schools, if your kid misses too many days of middle or high school, they could automatically fail their classes. And if your kid misses too many days in some districts, somebody's coming to find you and ask where your kids are.  But those hotel rates in Disney are so much better on a Thursday in the middle of October than Christmas week!  What’s a vacation-needing family to do?

Apparently, some parents argue that family vacations should be acceptable absences.  Family time, lessons from traveling, life experiences, etc. etc. Parents should be able to choose whether they want their kids in school or hiking in the Alps.

But what if family vacation isn't hiking in the Alps? What if it's going to visit grandma in the next state over? What if there's no vacation fund because dad lost his job, so family time is picnicking at the local park? What if you can't get your kid to school because he missed the bus and your car's in the shop and you need that cab fare to get to work – isn’t a missed day still a missed day? And it's interesting that this comes up as an issue for "vacation" when teachers for years, at least in my school experience, have said how disruptive it is when a student with roots in another country is out of school for a week or more to visit family back home.

Again, like so many issues, this becomes one of income, class, and family choices.  If parents can have permission to take their kids out to go canoeing in the Caribbean, can a student also get the day off to go hang out at the zoo with mom? If a kid gets a pass because the flight is cheaper if his family leaves on Thursday, does another kid get a pass because his mother ran out of bus fare to get to school?  If that kid can get his classwork packed up for him so that he can go skiing for a long weekend, can another kid get his classwork too, so he can stay home with his little sister while his mom goes on job interviews?

To make “vacations” an acceptable absence, then makes a judgment call on how a family uses their time or the choices they have to make.  That shouldn’t be the school’s decision.

On the other hand, as a parent, yes, you should be able to decide whether those plane discounts are worth your kid getting marked absent.  Your grown, your an adult, you get to make that choice. But then realize that there may be consequences for that absence, like not being able to make up the work and getting a zero.

It seems like an easy answer. But then you realize, everybody doesn't get vacation days.

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How to Kill Your Teaching Career

We want our kids to learn the basics of English- spelling, grammar, punctuation – all that “boring” stuff.  All the more better if the teacher comes up with an interesting way to involve those lessons, more than a worksheet with “circle the noun, underline the verbs” instructions, the way I learned it way back in the ink-smelling copies and pencil days of school.  And for an English class, you’d think there would be a lot of options, whether an essay about a book that the class is reading or a creative writing topic. What you don’t expect is for your kid to be doing their homework and ask “mom, what do you think I could get a hold of easier, a machete or a gun?”

Currently… Catching up, Planning, and Tech-Challenged

Can you believe Thanksgiving is next week?  Where did the year go?  What are you doing this week as we get ready to roll into the holiday season?  Here’s what I’m up to this week.

Currently….

Android v Mac Tech-challenged. Trying to figure out how to get the 2000 pictures off of my Android phone onto my Mac computer.  My husband said “all you gotta do…”  Always be careful with any instructions that begin with this phrase.  It’s a signal that the things is not going to be simple, at all.

Catching up from last week.  You know how it is when you take a few days out of your normal routine – whether it’s for vacation, or you get sick, or you have to travel for work.  When you get back to your normal, there’s all the stuff you’ve got to do that should’ve been done while you were out of your normal spot.  I spent Monday through Friday at the school bookfair last week, so now I’m catching up at home. Laundry, groceries, housekeeping.  Writing.  Are there things that we can just say, “forget it, it’s not getting done”?  (By the way - I've listed a few diverse picks from the bookshelves in this post from last week - Diverse Books form the Bookfair.)

Getting ready for this week.  And despite trying to catch up from yesterday, today is still here and tomorrow is still coming.  I’m working on my menu plan (which helps a little bit with that daily panic of what’s for breakfast, lunch and dinner), related grocery list, and everything else to do list.

Thinking about Sunday’s message at church, or at least the line that I lifted out of it: To be a bridge for the hopeless, you must be ready to be trampled upon.  Still thinking on it, let’s talk about it more tomorrow.

Exercising again.  I don’t really have to go into the got off track, gained a few pounds, blah blah blah explanation, right?  So now, especially before the dessert-rich holiday season really kicks in, I’m trying to do better.  On my shopping list is one of those holders for the treadmill so I can read read on my iPad while I’m doing my walking warm-up.  I can scan email, Facebook and Twitter, flip through a few articles in those ten minutes.  I’m not much for exercise multi-tasking (why I love swimming) but this little bit makes me feel productive until I turn up the speed and start running.  Do you go into any kind of pre-holiday diet or exercise routine?

And I’m writing.  Working on novel number two and a few blog posts.  Coming up soon are posts about #GivingTuesday and service and a review of Watching Seeds Grow for kid entrepreneurs in observance of National Entrepreneurship Week.

Have a great week!

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