First week

The first week of school has completed, and we’re all breathing a sigh of relief. The jr high pickup situation continues to be a disaster - there’s just TOO MANY KIDS. Also, I thought I could handle two pickups until my event is over, but I can’t. It’s two full hours of my life - from 2 pm until 4 pm - of driving back and forth every day. Theo asked when he was going to start doing “the library thing” and I figured Monday was as good a time as any. So on that day I’ll pick him up and walk him over to the library - we drove by today just so he knows what it looks like - and take him in and get a sense of what it’s like, how many kids are there, how chaotic it is or isn’t, etc. His 5th grade teacher is putting a big emphasis on reading, and I’m hoping this will be the year reading kicks in for him. She has him reading 30 min every night, and also reading during class. He told me he randomly picked The Diary of Anne Frank, which blew my mind. I read it in I think 6th grade, and it prompted a lifelong love of journal keeping (now this blog), not to mention a lifelong study of the horrors of the Holocaust in general. I told him all the facts I knew about her story - that you can still visit their hiding place in Amsterdam; that when the play premiered on Broadway and the final curtain went down the audience was completely silent; that Anne died just weeks before the camps were liberated. I hope he gets something out of that book - it loomed huge in my young life.

So hopefully starting Tuesday I can just do one pickup - SOMEHOW find a better spot to pick up Bobby - and then head to the library to get Theo who will have been there about an hour. It also occurred to me that on the final day of my event, when the kids are in school but we’re at the hotel packing up - although last year we did manage to make it home in time to pick up the kids (I had a friend pick them up just in case), we still need a plan in case we get stuck there. So I’ll have both Theo and Bobby walk to the library. I’ll have to print a map or something for Bobby, also show him where it is. Then I won’t have to worry that they’ll be standing around on the street while we’re stuck in traffic or something.

It’s hard to say how school is going for Bobby - he’s still stubbornly refusing to use his planner, which apparently is common among 7th grade boys - and during the week he definitely expressed a lot of dismay about the work and how complicated everything is now. I’m low-key worried about him, and wishing he hadn’t selected quite so many honors classes. But I also don’t have much mental space to really think about this at the moment, and it’s too early to tell how he’s actually doing. I’ve got a lot on my plate, to say the least.

After a lot of back and forth, I’ve decided to go ahead and add that additional day next year. I wrote out a detailed budget and a conservative estimate of how much of that extra expense I think could be covered, and it all seemed very doable. So I sat down and put together the whole updated schedule, contacted the friends who run the Thursday night venue I’ll be conflicting with, told more peripheral staff members, and the announcement will launch next week. I’m committing to it, now, and it’s a bit scary. But it’s also necessary, I think - other than moving to Labor Day in 2013, I’ve been doing everything exactly the same for many years. It’s time to shake things up and breathe new life into the thing as we head into our next quarter century.