The school year is winding down. One kid went to school in pajamas today (an official PJ day, don’t worry…). The 8th grader has virtual school on Friday, but appears to have no actual school beyond the 8 a.m. attendance check in. So he’ll likely tag along on the 6-year-old and toddler’s excursion today. As for the 6-year-old, he is completely done with school, having graduated from kindergarten yesterday.
His school year looked different than I thought it would. Back in early 2020, I enrolled him in our local public elementary school’s kindergarten. (Off the Clock readers will recall my “time dividend” bit on how I had done the enrollment process in early 2012, “repeated the process in 2015 and 2017, and barring unforeseen developments, I will do so again in 2020.”) Since it’s only half-day, I also enrolled him in his preschool’s half-day kindergarten enrichment program. The school district has an agreement to bus kids there at lunch.
Then with Covid (oh those unforeseen developments!), it was unclear that the public schools would open in the fall. Virtual school was just a non-starter for this extremely energetic little boy. Fortunately, when the local schools announced that they would open virtually, the preschool said they would open another full day in-person kindergarten class. So I pulled him out of the public school’s half-day program and enrolled him in the preschool’s full-time one.
The public schools wound up putting the kindergartners into in-person instruction within a few weeks, so maybe that decision wasn’t entirely necessary, but in any case, it has been wonderful. The morning portion of the day was a small class of all boys — not a coincidence, I think. It was nice that he got to play in the middle of the day instead of take the bus trip. He graduated on Wednesday and the school celebrated having zero Covid cases all year. He’s off to first grade at the public elementary school in the fall. And we’ll be back at the preschool in 2 years with our fifth child to attend!
I’ll take the 14-year-old to get his second vaccine dose later today. We might make it to the beach this weekend — we shall see. I hope to get a long run in. And sleep. It’s been a rough week for that but I slept in the guest room last night from 10:15 p.m. – 6:00 a.m. while my husband was on toddler duty and it was lovely.