The standard-issue first-day-of-school post
So the girls are back in the system, in our friendly neighbourhood downtown school. We're very very lucky in that we can walk our kids to a school with a hundred-and-fifty-year-old history, with three hundred kids up to grade 6 divided between French Immersion and English, a good team of teachers, fantastic art and music programs, and an ice-cream store around the corner. There's a very high percentage of families that live within a one-kilometre radius - I keep meaning to find out exactly what that number is, but of course it changes year to year. Because of that, there are an awful lot of downtown folks: artists/writers/musicians, entrepreneurs, activists, friends. It's common for students to walk to events and field trips in the downtown (they're going hunting Mermaids next week), and yet they have an outdoors with a reasonable play area and lots of big trees - no chainlink in sight. The lack of a core of uppercrust suburban families with more money than love means that possessions and status aren't big social factors, not in my kids' experience. Breakfast/snack bags are handed out to all by the Salvation Army; hot lunch you sign up for, but it's anonymously-pay-what-you-can. Although they don't wear uniforms, the rich kids are hard to spot. I personally like most of the kids and parents (and other adults!) that I interact with there, and that's a great feeling.
Jean was moaning about school starting for the last week or two (and of course Eleanor picked right up on it, sheesh) but I think they were glad to start. Eleanor was very positive indeed, especially when she found out that her teacher was the student who interned in her kindergarten last year, whom she adores; that her kindergarten friends from both "her" half and the "other" half (they were divided to half go in the morning and half in the afternoon, switched monthly) were all in attendance; and that the hard math that Jean warned her about wasn't making an appearance just yet. Madame is quite willing to make accommodations for the change to full-day school, and in turn I think Eleanor is going to be eager to please her.
Grade Four is going to introduce Jean to real work, I think: when I peeked in her classroom after getting Eleanor settled, the students' desks were lined up in rows and the students were in them, hands folded in the desks, paying strict attention to a teacher who was writing on the board and speaking in rapid-fire French. They had homework the first day: ten French words, ten English words, and three French dicteé sentences to be tested next Wednesday, Friday, and Monday, respectively. Jean complained that the classroom bookshelf was very small compared to Grade Three's, and could she please take some books to school to read at recess and lunchtime? This might sound like a laudable idea (and, for some kids, no more likely to come out of their mouths than "No more ice-cream, thank you."), but we said no. Jean reads English well and willingly, but she had her nose stuck in a book for just all her free time (and some non-free as well) last year, and got edged out of the social scene. She protested that it didn't bother her, but I know quite well how that feels. We discouraged the book idea, so she spent all of her lunchtime yesterday talking with Isabel (and so forgot to eat, grr!) and brought Bridget home after school for a couple hours. Good start. There's lots of time to read when she's on her own, and I'm sure she'll use it.
So in Bob's suddenly copious free time, he's started once again to tackle the kitchen. (Funny how not much gets done in that line when your house is full of kids wanting to go out and do summer things.) There are also many smaller house projects that will keep him busy for a good while yet, even if no more contract work arises, that take more than two hours but less than six, so I'm looking forward to all that getting done. With my much-shorter commute this year, I can take the kids to school in the morning and help them with homework in the afternoon, which I'm hoping will make our home lives run even more smoothly. Any chance to begin anew and make inroads into the chaos that we usually live in sounds good to me.