Newfangled Dad

The good news about my son starting early in the public school system is that it will give me plenty of material for the blog. And last night was no exception.  We live in one of the best school districts in the nation. But--as residents here love to tell you and anybody who listens--we also pay some of the highest property taxes in the nation. Combine that with simultaneously living in an era when people love to dump on teachers and our educational system and you have an interesting recipe if you want to sit back and observe what it's really like.  We left impressed.  It was an evening for new students to that elementary (not our "real" school where Cole will go for Kindergarten, mind you) to take tours, meet staff, see their classrooms, etc.. So lots of preschoolers and Kindergarten, lots of people new to the village in general, and then I was happy to see that a couple "veteran" preschoolers came back to visit. We even got a report from a mom who w...

The first unit of the year is going to be dinosaurs! Cole was very excited to learn that info this morning. There should be a dino coloring page coming in the mail for him to do before the first day, too. He's been anxiously awaiting a letter from his teacher for the last few mail pickups. The letter's not here. But, thanks to the magic of modernity, I've already been e-mailing his teacher so I got an early preview via pdf. Points to her, she replied to my e-mail within hours, has a blog, and is deftly handling nervous parents sending their baby to her classroom for the first time. When we found out Cole would be entering daily preschool , the district told use we'd be hearing from both the teacher and the bus company about his transportation arrangements. We were wanting a bit of a heads up on the school supplies and getting worried about the ticking countdown to the First Day of School so I happened across the program's webpage and saw that Cole's teacher ha...

It was my night to take Leda to swim lessons again and we were much better about not arriving early this time. Get in right on time, choose a duck, head to the pool with no waiting. Lots of dads there again--clearly, parents are splitting the duties like us. (We always joke that we're a very typical family for being so atypical.) Leda knew where we were going immediately and was super excited. But I think she used all her energy in anticipation because about halfway through the lesson she just zoned out. She was cold and tired and 6:30 is just too close to bedtime. She didn't jump in like she did with Kelly, but we sang songs (and clung to her rubber duck) with enthusiasm. It's a mix of kids with different ages and developmental stages so it ranges from smaller than Leda up to Cole's age. So Leda's not quite ready for the closed "scoop" finger bowl making elementary strokes in the water. She blows bubbles in the air but isn't quite ready to blow th...

It's been a rough 24 hours. I rarely highlight the downs of parenting, but yesterday may have been the worst in 2.5 years of being a dad.  In addition to me still dealing with the headache from a fading cold...there was blood. Twice. My lip from a Cole headbutt--he didn't mean to, we were being silly, but still he has no in-between function between hard little boy play and quiet. It's zero or 60...he has no 30. And he was scared because he visibly hurt me and I was upset so he was upset. I tried to turn it into a "everything is ok, but this is why we ask you to calm down and be gentle" teaching moment. He's just not there yet.  The second cut was his foot. No clue where it came from and it was just a scratch. But (start your awww motors) he wanted me to "fix" it thinking I could simply make the cut go away. How do you explain to a 2.5 year old that his body will need a few days to heal? I asked if he wanted a band-aid me to clean it. I did m...

Have a great weekend, everybody! I did want to offer two interesting articles on the President's plan for universal preschool though... There's this one from USA Today (McNews, as I call it) on Oklahoma's free, full day universal preschool program which is one of the best in the nation. I know a few other states are well-known...Georgia, I believe, was mentioned in the Obama SOTU speech. There's also this one from the New York Times  on expanding high-quality preschool in general. I have much, much, much, much more to say about this topic later on. But I'll start by saying that A) I don't think free universal preschool is the magic bullet for fixing our educational system but B) it's the best start we could possibly begin with. Which is sort of a strange duality there. One of the complaints about K-12 funding is that we're already throwing good money at the problem and test scores aren't going up. This, of course, assumes we're throwin...