Alternative School Parents Are The Worst

...but most other parents are also brutal.  You can't convince me otherwise.  Last week we had curriculum night at our school, which is basically an opportunity for the parents to come with the kids and check out their kid's classroom and find out what the overall objectives are for the year.

Our school shares a space with this alternative school, which is filled with 99% entitled white kids who think they are special stars (that's not me being racist, that's a legit observation - lack of diversity in the alternative school has been identified by all parties and they're trying to step up their "recruitment" as a result).  The schools share a principal, who takes great pains at every opportunity to tell you that he's the principal of two very busy, very active schools, the subtext of which is: "don't bother me."  This all means that during his presentation at curriculum night, the alternative school kids were running amok and being loud and he didn't try to have the room in control before starting his short presentation, so you couldn't hear anything and the audience was bananas.  It was a gong-show.  The alternative school is tiny, like maybe a hundred kids, max in total, but their parents are apparently very demanding.  As the Dotytron has astutely noted, why is funding going towards that?!  Why don't we have an autism school, or something equivalent that is desperately needed in the province?  Instead, our alternative school has the kids call their teachers by their first names, and they sit outside a bunch and it's supposed to teach the "whole child" (as opposed to regular school, where they only teach the kid's armpits?)

This is what you learn when you become a parent of a school-aged chld in downtown Toronto: OTHER PARENTS ARE CRAY.  The investment, outrage, and entitlement that people feel engaging with a public system is laughable, almost.  It's where a failure of the imagination, ego, misunderstanding of redistribution and community, and the zero-sum game that is modern, urban, educated elite parenting swirl together in a seething mass of bristling ignorance.  The same women who would stop me during my maternity leave and marvel at the fact that I had the guts to leave the house with a 3 year old and twin infants in tow, are the SAME PEOPLE who expect a teacher to personally shepherd their child to the bathroom, each time they have to go pee, in a class of TWENTY FOUR other students!  Mom who is wigging that the FREE SNACK provided was a yoghurt tube and not whatever the f**k tasteless brick of coconut oil and flax flour you wanted to make, here's a pro tip: ABSTAIN FROM THE FREE SNACK.  Or, better yet, JUNIOR KINDERGARTEN IS OPTIONAL, PULL YOUR KID OUT!  People basically just want to create little private schools without paying a single extra cent.  It's mind-boggling, really.

Here's the seedy underside of this: IT MAKES YOU CRAY, TOO.  Or it does me at any rate.  When you're caught up in a nattering maelstrom of helicopter, attachment-parenting types it's easy to lose your centre and get swept up in madness.  The Dotytron is really good at staying above the fray and putting things in perspective.  Last night after curriculum night he said look, at the end of the day, does the Big Yam feel safe?  Does he feel supported and comfortable?  If those requirements are being met we are lucky in that we can fill the other potential gaps in his education on our own, if need be.  The Big Yam has made a little friend and they are super-cute together:

Also, we have a new principal who is making classic new principal mistakes and kow-towing to the demands of the crazy parents.  I emailed the principal about them losing the Big Yam, because I thought the communication (mainly from the administration) wasn't great.  So I went early late last week to meet with him and the the Big Yam's teacher and he TOTALLY THREW THE TEACHER UNDER THE BUS!  He turned to her during the meeting and was like, "What are YOU going to do so that this doesn't happen again?"  and I was like, "wait, whaaaat?  That s**t ain't right, son."  To me, that's crappy management.  I was there with the express purpose of working WITH them to figure out what we might need to change from an operational standpoint so that you don't lose a kid on the first day, maybe.  I've talked to some teacher friends, and the consensus is that usually what happens in these meetings, is the teacher and the principal work together BEFORE the parent shows up, come up with a plan, and then the principal says during the meeting, "we are going to do x, y, z" and the teacher says, "uh huh" and then boom, it's done.  The way he handled this seriously made me think he was a giant a-hole.  Then, he threw her under the bus AGAIN, privately, when he pulled me into the office and assured me that what she did was unacceptable, and he took it seriously.  I intellectually know what happened.  He thought I was one of those cray helicopter parents and was going to like, sue the school or something.  Uh, no.  I get that it can happen, no biggie.  What I'm less impressed with is you undermining your staff member in front of me and hanging them out to dry.

Is our kindergarten teacher the greatest?  No.  I'm not like, stoked to have her and I don't think I would want the Big Yam in her class next year, if we decide to stay.  But, she hasn't done anything so far that makes me outraged.  She seems kind of checked out, but she's 24 years into her career.  I don't blame her.  I'm certainly not wigging the way one of the other parents is, because her daughter had an accident at recess and so the teacher sent her daughter in with an SK buddy to go get changed in the cubby area, and at the end of the day, her daughter's dirty clothes were strewn in the cubby area.  Mom is all like, "where was the follow through?  Isn't that a safety issue?"  And I'm like, uh, why don't you talk to your kid about putting their dirty clothes back in their bag after?  Do you expect teacher to personally shepherd your kid to get changed?  And what, leave the other 13 kids out front during recess by themselves?  How does that make sense?  Of course, mom felt the need to take that to the principal (?!?)

Anyway, I can't handle that shiz.  When I can, I do the drop off and pick-up (like on my days off, or even on days like today, when I'm home sick), because cray-cray parents would have you believe that that's when you get the "scoop" and "gossip."  But to me, it's not worth it.  My friends who dump their kids at daycare in the morning and then pickup from daycare are blissfully removed from the s**tstorm of crazy and I'd rather be in with them.

In the interests of transparency, I feel like I owe it to you to be truthful and say that after touting the systems we've developed to ease our transition, week 2 was a bit rough.  The Big Yam was crying every day wanting me to take him to school and not understanding that I have to go to work.  Last week I got stuck on public transit for an hour coming home and wasn't prepared and by the time I came home they had all eaten dinner without me.   Last Friday, our nanny called in sick so the Dotytron and I had to do the whole 6am/staredown/decide who is going to bite the bullet thing.  Thankfully, things seem to have settled this week.  I think the Big Yam gets that this is his new reality and seems to be adjusting fine.  He's such a laid back kid.  We are lucky, although I will say that based purely on anecdotal evidence, laid back parents tend to have laid back kids.  One mom of a classmate of the Big Yam's keeps sending histrionic texts about how her anxiety is at "through the roof" levels because teacher has been off sick for the past few days and they've had a couple of different supply teachers in.  Really?  There are some people who have real problems.  Remember that.

I feel like they finally seem like real babies.  The Quincess has bulked up like whoa.

Quincess pose - LOL!

Weeknight dinners: a smoke gouda, potato, bacon, and kale quiche

Shrimp and salmon corn chowder with cheddar sage biscuits

Pot roast & root vegetable mash

Breaded tilapia, homemade tartar sauce, salted heirlooms, and buffalo fried cauliflower, which is AMAZING.

Fin.

We Did It, Ma!

First full day of JK for the Big Yam.  First day back to work for me.  First day where I've only spent 3 of the babies' 11 waking hours with them.  As one would reasonably expect with that number of firsts, the last week went largely smoothly but not without some hiccups.

For example, after dropping the Big Yam off at school and going through the whole "furtively-wiping-tears-off-our-faces" bonding camp with the other JK parents outside in the kindergarten pen, I met up with the Roomie for brunch.  We were in her car on our way when I got a call from my nanny saying she was "concerned" because she had heard an announcement on the PA to the effect of: "Will Master T please go back to his classroom."  She was worried so the Roomie and I turned the car around and headed to the school.  I went into the office, got the attention of the Vice Principal and said, "Um, I heard that there was an announcement made for my son?" And he said, "Oh, are you T's mom?  After music class, he got swept up with the big kids and ended up outside with the big kids during their recess.  Don't worry, we found him very quickly and had all hands on deck looking for him!"  At the time, I was pretty blasé about it and the Roomie and I had a big laugh, but the more I think about it, the more I'm a bit, "WTF?"  How the heck did that happen?  Isn't 75% of the make-up of a primary teacher's day lining kids up, making them hold hands, and counting them?  Later on, after quizzing our nanny, she said she was first twigged to there being an issue when a man I now suspect was the VP came running into the drop-in centre (which is in the school) inquiring if there was a "Master T, in JK" there.  Five minutes later (by her accounting), the announcement was made on the PA.  That's a long time for a kid to go missing!

Later in the week I emailed the principal because I felt like the communication from the school was lacking.  The Big Yam's teacher made a cursory mention of it in passing during the frenzied cattle call that is pick up.  The principal INSTANTLY responded and said he was going over the procedures with the Big Yam's teacher and that he was actually the one who found the Big Yam and it was only a minute, but one minute is a minute too long in his books (I can't believe he wrote those words!) blah blah blah.  

One thing of note that I've experienced since starting this whole "parent-of-a-school-aged-child" thing this year is how the Dotytron's loyalties are weighed disproportionately (in my opinion) towards his fellow teacher brethren (and sistren?)  When I went out and dutifully bought fiendishly expensive lunch containers for the school's "literless lunch" program, I was chastised because the Big Yam couldn't open the leak-proof clasps and that this would now be the "teacher's" responsibility.  I was criticized just this morning because I had the temerity to put the Big Yam in jeans that had a zipper and one of those sliding hook/tab closures because it would make it so much harder for "teacher" when he had to go to the bathroom.  When I balked at buying the Big Yam a pair of sneakers JUST for indoor use at school (my rationale being, why can't he wear his sneakers to school and indoors and then, if it's raining or snowy, then transition them as his indoor shoes?) the Dotytron gave me a hard time and told me that I was being unreasonable and why can't I just follow the school's directives?  

The point being: he's slowly letting slip whose team he's on and he's making an enemy of me.  Haha, just kidding (OR AM I?!?)  When I told him I emailed the principal and that my intention wasn't to get the teacher in trouble, he got all accusatory: "So why didn't you bring it up with the teacher?  Why did you have to escalate things and go straight to the principal?" In my defense, blog readers, my rationale is that this was an operational/management issue.  The communication protocol was really ad-hoc.  If my nanny hadn't been at the school that day, I would have found out at the end of the day, through the teacher's hurried, over-the-shoulder account, which, incidentally, varied substantively from the report of my witness?  Why are the JKs being transitioned from their rotary classes at the same time as the bigger kids?  If it was from music class, why isn't the music teacher responsible?  Who is responsible?  What procedures do they have in place to make sure this doesn't happen again?  At the very least, what can we do to make sure this doesn't happen on a kid's FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL, EVER?!?  

Full disclosure: this principal is already on my s**t list, so yeah, and has already made an enemy of me so yeah, I'm going to be looking for his administrative failings and bringing them STRAIGHT TO HIS FRONT DOOR.  The story of how he finds himself so low in my standing is a tale for another day.

The first day at work was invigorating.  I nailed my outfit, unpacked all my shoes, felt good.  A lot of things change but your day to day doesn't.  That seems to be most jobs.  You're just right back into it.  It felt normal, and right.  There was a brief moment at the end of the day, when the realization that I was supposed to come back, every day, FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE set in, that got a bit grim, but then I shook myself and soldiered on.  At the end of the day, I am extraordinarily lucky.  I have a job I love, that I do well at, that I only rarely take home with me, that's a 25 minute bike commute from my home.  That's pretty darn good, folks.

We've got a good system set up, too.  We get up just before 6am (yes, you read that right).  The Dotytron does his thing, he sets out the Big Yam's breakfast (his current cereal breakfast fixation lends itself to set-up): a bowl of Shreddies, a glass of milk he can pour into the bowl, a vitamin, and then assembles the Big Yam's lunch, and does his thing.  I either go for a run, or eat my own breakfast and do a bunch of dinner prep.  By the time the Dotytron leaves for the day at around 7am, the babies are awake (and bless their souls, they're usually just lying awake, quiet in their cribs, waiting for someone to come and get them), we bring them down, I feed them breakfast, get myself ready, and our nanny shows up in time to clean them up and get all three boys changed and out the door for the day.  The Dotytron comes home, usually overlaps with the nanny for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, and uses that time to have her occupy the kids so he can get final dinner preparations done, and I walk in the door around 5:45pm.  It's a very sane, sensible, and manageable system.

The idea of school lunches seems to strike fear in the hearts of many parents.  It was listening to the neighbour-moms nattering about it that was the catalyst for me outsourcing the task to the Dotytron.  My neighbours swear by the hot lunch program at school, but it's $90/16 instructional days and I felt like we could make jumped-up substantial-snack type lunches for much less.  Really, it ain't no thing.  It takes him a maximum of 5 minutes.  Unlike my halcyon childhood, where I had a deli meat sandwich every day for my entire school existence,  we try to limit processed meats, so he only gets that twice a week.  One day he gets a homemade "lunchable" of crackers, kolbassa cut up, baby carrots, and cheese (curds, Babybel, cut up whatever we have in the cheese drawer).  One day he gets a mortadella/ham tortilla roll-up thing.  One day he gets a Wow Butter sandwich.  One day he gets leftover breakfast from the weekend (so, pancakes, waffles, French toast with a little container of syrup).  One day will be either dinner leftovers, a thermos thing like soup, or us trying to get him to try something new (egg salad, tuna salad, etc.).  He always gets a fruit on the side, or we bulk it up with yogurt.  So far our main problem has been him losing the spoons we give him to eat the yogurt with.   Today he took leftover Indian food from Friday Night Takeout Night (at his request): "I want to take the chicken and the rice and the beans.  Lots."  

I've also got a system in place for the weekly menu planning so that we can eat at a reasonable time and still give the kids time for outdoor play with the neighbourhood rugrats/bath/extended stories, etc.  I do one night a week where it's a prepared meal from the freezer, one night where it's a slow-cooker type thing, one night where it's a simple, one-pot pasta type dish.  One night is leftovers.  The idea is that this way, you're only ever doing night-of "cooking" twice a week (not including weekends, which is when I get to go to town, and when I produce those double-batches of things that end up in the freezer).  Listen people, there are people who have made careers out of this (Dinner: A Love Story blog, I'm looking at you!).  

Also, our nanny does LIGHT HOUSEKEEPING!!!  Every time you see the words "light housekeeping," please imagine me on my knees, raising my hands to the heavens in thanks.  Hiring a nanny was the best decision we ever made.  Before, when we left for work, the house would be in a state of disarray that ran the gamut from, "dishes left on the counter" to "dishes left on the counter AND vomit of unknown origin (cat/human?) left to solidify and turn crusty on the floor."  It wasn't pretty.  Now, I come home to a clean house!  Our amazing nanny tidies up so that I at least come home and I'm starting from a reasonable point.  Like, at the top of a pile of excrement with a backhoe loader, and not having to dig through the excrement to GET to the backhoe loader.  That's Booker Prize nomination-level writing there, folks.  She folds our laundry!  Cleans our floors!  Tidies the bathroom!  Vacuums!  I've got a system going where I do the laundry and leave the baskets out and if she has time, she does them.  I stressed to her that the main focus is obviously, the kids.  So the laundry will get folded only if she has time and has made sure to take a proper lunch break, etc.  I told her that between the three of us, it will get done.  

I've also made a point of staying device-free until everyone is put down to bed, because I only get two hours with those nuggets, and I want to be as present as possible for them, so they don't forget that I brought them into the world and as such, they OWE ME, DAMMIT.  

I took the Big Yam to see the Wiggles on Saturday and spent a pretty penny on seats (considering it's the Wiggles, after all).  The best part was that the night I told him at dinner we were going to see them, he spent a good ten minutes laughing, and shaking his head in disbelief going, "Nooooooooo"  "Noooooo!"  "C'mon, Mama, nooooooooo!"  "They don't even live here!"  "Noooooooo!"  That alone, made the price of admission worthwhile.  

Here are some photos of recent life:

I just have something stuck in my eye.

At the Wiggles concert on Saturday.

Goodbye, fall dinner: roasted chicken thighs, corn pudding, and a zucchini, potato, and tomato gratin with a breadcrumb topping jacked up with chopped capers and anchovies and fresh oregano.  So good!

I made a brown butter custard raspberry pie.  Lifted almost straight from this recipe here.  My only substitutions was upping the amount of butter to 4T in the filling and omitting the vanilla bean.  I would take out the nutmeg next time and maybe sub with ground cardamom.

Corned beef hash!

Kathi rolls from one of my favorite restaurants near my work, the Kathi Roll Express, which serves New York style kathi rolls.  Lamb seekh, butter chicken, chicken tikka, paneer skakslik, and the channa.  So freakin' good!

A late summer meal we had of steamed clams and arugula salad

Leftover lobster roll filling got repurposed for lobster carbonara pappardelle which was SO EFFING GOOD.  

Trout with browned butter, that gratin again, and sweet corn.

Fin.

Firsts and Lasts

The other day, the Big Yam was watching The Incredibles with the Dotytron.  There is a scene where Mr. Incredible comes across the skeletal remains of a vanquished superhero peer.  The Big Yam asked, "What happened to that guy?" and the Dotytron replied, "Well, when you die, your body turns into dirt and the skeleton is what's left" and without missing a beat, completely unfussed, the Big Yam said matter-of-factly, "I'm not gonna die."  It wasn't even a question - it was very much, "Oh that?  That doesn't apply to me."

That.  That is why the thought of him putting on his backpack with his little label on it, in his labelled shoes, with his labelled lunch bag, and labelled litterless lunch accoutrements (as I now know, a big part of getting ready for school involves spending an enormous amount of time and money on labeling things), and looking back at me when I drop him off tomorrow for his first full day of JK, when the door closes and he's in a class with about 20 other kids all confused and overwhelmed - that is why when I think about it I start to cry.  

I can tell him to get back up when he scrapes a knee and convince him he's fine and brush it off, but I won't be able to convince him he's fine when he realizes that the world is very, very big and can be very, very cruel, and that part of growing up in the world means losing your innocence.  And what is innocence if it's not the blissful ignorance of your own tenuousness?

Part of the deal with being hitched to a teacher is that as a consequence, your life is constantly given form by concrete beginnings and endings.  Starts and stops.  Fall and the firsts and summer and lasts.  Now I'm being thrown into it twofold.  The Big Yam had his last day with J his daycare provider two Fridays ago and she and I looked at each other and gave stern instructions that neither of us was to cry and then she handed me two thick binders of the "homework" she's been doing with him this entire time - his wobbly attempts at drawing faces, cutting straight lines, matching numbers and she started telling us how special and talented he is and I lost it (am losing it as I write this and remember).

Last week there was a 15 minute "interview" with the teacher which went really well.  There was all this DRAMA with his teacher assignment (to be detailed in a later post) and I was nervous but I met her and she is lovely.  She's no the most popular of the kindergarten teachers, but she emphasizes a lot of outdoor time (which I like) and her class size is only 15 kids, which is amazing.  The Dotytron always says that you can throw as much money at the education system as you want, but ultimately, it comes down to teacher student ratio (which is a money issue, at the end of the day), and the lower the ratio, the better your kid will do.  Then on Friday there was a one-hour "orientation" which means that we dropped him off at 9 and he stayed at school for an hour.  He looked so lost standing out there, with his giant backpack on and mayhem around him.  I kept it together for his sake and mine and then got our nanny settled with the babies at the drop-in centre and then walked home and bawled the whole way.  I anticipate more of that on Monday.

I read something on a mommy blog (I know, just shoot me now) that resonated though.  It was something someone's mom told them, to the effect of: "You just make sure that when your kids walk through the door at the end of the day, home is the most comforting place to be."  I know there is so much that I can't control, but that, I can do.  I will make sure that my kids feel supported and loved and safe within these walls and hopefully, that sense of security will allow them to carry "home" with them, throughout the day, as armor against the world's many, many indignities.

The point is: he's not just ours any more.  For the past 4 years we've been working on making him a person that will go out into the world and be kind, and moral, and productive, and now is the time for us to see how we did.  We've been getting him ready to be shared with the world and slowly broadening his circle bit by bit and now's the first big test.  I hope we get an A.  I am nothing if not the grade-grubber of all grade grubbers.

They set the bar kind of low in JK.  I went in to the interview with the teacher wondering if we should be working harder on sight words, and she came back at me with, "his only homework is to read a book each day," and she kept stressing the importance of reading and I was like, Lady, MAMA KNOWS.  We've recently started into chapter books.  I took him with me and we picked out Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which he was into for a day, but lately he's been more into Little House in the Big Woods.  He likes the pictures (so do I) and seems to be quietly absorbing some of it.  Sometimes we supplement the reading by looking up clips of panther screams so it can be a little more concrete for him.  I asked him to assign characters and he was like, "I'm Mary, you're Pa, Baba's Ma," and I asked, "Who would Lenny be?" and he said, "Lenny would be the big black cat" (the panther).  LOL!

People keep asking me how I feel about going back.  Fine, I guess?  I think it will be hard, but our nanny is wonderful and amazing and the kids love her and we've worked out a comfortable routine so knowing that is all squared away makes me feel good about going back.  Also: they opened a J. Crew near my work, so, um yeah, I'm stoked.  I've decided that my style icons are Jenna Lyons and Lucy Chadwick, with still some hippie boho Coachella vibes at home and weekends in the summer.

This layering game is so TIGHT.

One of the things I mastered this year while on maternity leave is the J Crew sleeve roll, so I'm feeling pretty good about that.  I'm on an extreme fitness regimen in the interest of losing weight so I don't have to buy a whole new work wardrobe.  I don't know if it's working or not...maybe a little?  It is making me feel very hungry every night when I go to bed and it is inspiring me to go for a 30 minute run so I can earn more calories so I can eat more sweets.  

Here are some pics from my life, lately:

Dr. Rei had her baby and he is an original nuttah and basically the best and he is making me want to have a million more babies so I can cuddle them and then largely ignore them while I use my phone and/or practice the J Crew sleeve roll.

We took the whole family to the Ex with our neighbours and their daughter and were there for 6 hours and I almost died from exhaustion but it was so worth it.

These two at Lowe's.  

Probably the last time they'll wear their South Beach onesies

Being a joker, as usual.

My goon squad.

The Wonder Twins have been going buck and seem to be doing some catch up.  The other day we had penne and meatballs for dinner and they ate 3 plates of pasta and 4 meatballs each and only stopped because the Dotytron wanted to save some for me.  They both have lots of words now, the cutest thing being that Lenny defaults to pointing at something and saying, "What's this" and the Quincess points at stuff and says, "That."  They are basically the embodiment of this jungle tune:

They also say "ball", "woof" (for dog), do the sign for "more", say "po-po" (Cantonese for "pick me up") and Poh Poh, as well as Mama and Baba.  The Quincess can say the Cantonese word for "light" and can also mimic you when you say "turtle."  They both love stories and reading, and the Quincess will often quietly sit and pretend to read Eric Carle's Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and sometimes sits and points to the pictures and "reads" out loud by saying, "Dut duh duh. Duh duh," with this regular cadence.  It's so cute.  Lenny is a wild man with no sense of caution.  At the wading pool he will crawl into water with his mouth open until it's over his head and not notice a thing.  

They are extraordinary beings and I love them the mostest.

Okay, gotta go decide which tree I'm going to hide and sob behind tomorrow morning!

Fin.