21 months ... or, where the heck did the past 9 months go?!

Yep, that's right. Daphne is 21 months old today, meaning the last time I blogged about just her was shortly after she turned 1! I guess the main event of the past 9 months was her brief stint in daycare. As I mentioned in her one-year update, Daphne began the gradual transition to part-time daycare shortly after her birthday.

Painting at Eryn's house.

The transition went really smoothly. She was home sick quite a bit during those first five or six weeks, to be expected, but it wasn't nearly as bad as I remember with Elias, perhaps because her immune system had already been prepped by interacting with a bunch of preschoolers and then grade-schoolers nearly every day since she was 3 weeks old. Or perhaps we just got lucky. I'm sure preschool will be another shock to the immune system!

Home with one of many bugs those first few weeks of daycare.

At any rate, other than that, she made the transition really well. There were some tears, but even on the couple of days she cried at drop-off the report at least was that she calmed down within minutes of me leaving and remained pretty happy throughout the day. She bonded with Eryn, our daycare gal, much more quickly than Elias, running to her and gesturing for her to pick her up pretty early on.

Sitting with Eryn in the sandbox. Note "bear lovey", crucial to the successful daycare transition each day.

So it was a success! But it only lasted a few months. Long story short, work was slow to pick up and after about six months I decided, with Neal's full support, of course, to draw a line in the sand. When sales hadn't picked up by end of summer, I decided to pull Daphne from daycare and make the transition back to being a full-time stay-at-home mama. Of course, I'm not exactly contributing financially right now, which is a tricky thing in and of itself, but on top of slow sales, I was really stressing each month over the added cost of daycare. Until I can figure out this work thing, I might as well be the one to take care of the pre-pre-schooler!

Daphne's post-swim shenanigans.

In addition to the financial stress, there are a few reasons daycare is trickier the second time around. Yes, I could put Elias in after school care and extend my work days, but given that's not the case, his school day dictates our schedule, which doesn't really mesh well with typical daycare. I'd pick him up at 3 (or even earlier, at 1:20, on Oakland's "minimum days") and we'd have some time to kill, Daphne still likely napping at daycare, but not enough time to do anything too exciting that didn't involve sitting in killer rush-hour traffic on the way to get her closer to 5 (daycare closes at 5:30). And even picking her up at 4:30 or 4:45 or so would be way earlier than any of the other kids. Some days they'd still be having their afternoon snack when we arrived! Daycare is really designed for full-time working parents. Not only does it not really work well with an older kid's school schedule, you don't get much of a financial break for part-time. And if I have to choose between a full-time "real" job and spending TONS of time (maybe too much at times) with my kids right now, a little broke though we may be, I choose the latter.

Me and my crazy-makers.

And so far it's been a mixed bag, I won't lie. Keeping a toddler entertained every day is hard work. I'm so tired. All the time. My only breaks in a typical 14-15 hour day are during her nap (which I have to make sure begins by about 12:30 each day to ensure she's up - or well rested if woken up - by 2:30 pm so we can go fetch big brother from school) and after both kids are in bed and all the "chores" are done, by about 9 pm each night. By then I'm thoroughly beat. And naps are eaten up with all sorts of tedious day-to-day tasks like cleaning up after lunch, school stuff, packing up snacks and whatever we might need for the 3-5 shift with both kids, leaving little time for anything extra like "work", updating my blogs, working on crafty projects, or tackling that never-ending home improvement list. Don't even get me started on so-called "self care".

Too tall for her own good.

All that said, at the end of each day (yes, after she's asleep), in that small slice of time between the kids' bedtimes and mine, I'm still pretty satisfied with my decision. I just don't think I'd make a good working mama, at least not at this moment in my motherhood. And she'll be ready for preschool in a blink, you know? I just have to figure out how we're going to pay for it between now and then.

Happy Picture Day!

Today is picture day at Elias' school! We devoted portions of the past week to getting his hair cut, shopping for a new button-down shirt, and practicing his "natural smile." To be fair, last year's picture wasn't half bad. You can't go wrong with a crisp button-down shirt and a buzz cut. But his smile does look forced (especially compared to the more candid shots his preschool's photographer captured the year before). Combine that with some seriously disheveled locks and I suppose that's enough to send a decent percentage of the school's parents into a tizzy, emailing recommendations for new photographers for next year and just generally commiserating with one another over awkward results. I wonder how many of those parents were more satisfied with their retakes a couple of months later? As it was, I figured Elias' first try was probably about as good as it was gonna get. I look back on it now and I think, yeah, that's a pretty fair representation of a 5 year old just weeks into his first year of "real school." At least he still had all his teeth.

And apparently not enough parents felt riled up enough to do anything about it beyond virtually voicing their dissatisfaction because when information came home about picture day this year, the same company was listed as last year. I'm pretty sure it's the same photographers who took our pictures in the 70s and 80s! Anyway, I fret over a lot of parenting stuff, don't get me wrong, but Picture Day is pretty low on the list of things that keeps me up at night. That said, when I learned this morning that my weekly volunteer time today would overlap with the classroom's slot, I'll admit I was a little relieved (fortunate to be able to fulfill my duties as SAHM to 20 month old Daphne and spend about 45 minutes in the classroom each Friday ... so, no, I'm not exactly crazy mom).

Great, I thought, I'll be able to make sure his shirt collar's not flipped up and smooth down any rogue strands of bedhead. After all, Friday mornings begin with an hour of P.E. Then they have recess. And then they have snack. I mean, seriously, can you imagine hitting the gym, then, I don't know, whatever the adult equivalent of playing with friends for 20 minutes is, then eating, before going directly into a photo session?! Whatever your kid looked like at drop-off, I can guarantee you that's not how they're going to look after all that, over 2 hours later! So I did my best to fuss with all the kids, straightening out shirt collars, suggesting the removal of outerwear like jackets with clashing animal patterns, handing out combs to brush bangs to one side or another, and distributing wipes to remove any lingering crumbs from fake smiles.


Even so, the one-minute walk to the auditorium, the several minutes of waiting and fidgeting in line, not to mention the few seconds the photographer had his back turned after carefully positioning each kid was enough to turn the freshly coiffed 1st grader into a disheveled ragamuffin! It was kind of incredible, actually, and adorably hilarious, like Lord Business trying to position Ma and Pa during the bad cop kragle scene. "All I'm asking for is total perfection!" Basically. I mean, really, what kid stands with their feet in first position, their hands casually in their pockets, and their chin pointed ever so slightly downward? I witnessed this poor photographer trying valiantly to get my kid to hold this position for 30 seconds! That's it! But each time he turned away - the second he turned his back! - Elias straightened up, looked at the lights and umbrellas instead of at the camera lens, chin up, and even from the side I could tell he was sporting the same fake smile as last year.

Sigh.

I don't know what the moral to this story is. I'm sure my son's school could find a better photographer, one a little more successful, perhaps, in capturing kids' adorableness in a more natural setting. But in a public school situation where picture day is a factory operation, I think the results aren't half bad! I purchased the biggest package for a little over $50 - with a coupon, but still. You can certainly opt out and hire a private photographer, right? This is a little like moms spending hundreds of dollars to cut and color their own hair then balking at the $20 the kids' haircut place charges. We've taken few professional photos, but I'm guessing they're pretty pricey. For fifty bucks tops, messy hair and a fake smile may just be as good as it gets. After all, sane parenting is all about managing expectations, right?

the 1st week of 1st grade

Now that I've finally caught this blog up on all things Kindergarten, I'm going to try to keep up the momentum, skip over "Wacky Wednesdays" and summer shenanigans for now, not to mention the gazillion ways little sister has changed over the past 8 months, and get right into 1st grade.

Neal had to travel for work during that entire first week of school, which just happened to be an entire week of minimum days, meaning I had to pick up Elias at 1:20 each day instead of 3 p.m. Thankfully Daphne was still in part-time daycare, but that week was her last regular week. So it was kinda crazy.

Thank goodness for this moment of zen. Of the three 1st grade teachers, Elias got the most sort of strict, "old-school" one. She's grown on me considerably over the past six weeks and a couple of his best buddies from last year are in his class again this year, so that helps.

1st grade so far is really different from Kindergarten. Kindergarten seemed like a natural next step from preschool, especially after two years of preschool! But 1st grade is a huge leap, in my opinion, from Kindergarten. The classroom focus seems to be all reading, writing, and math. Which is fine - obviously, I'm excited for Elias to improve his reading & writing skills this year (math seems to be less challenging for him at this stage) - but thank goodness for the enrichment classes (art, library, garden, science, and PE) that break up the week and recess, of course, to break up the day. Not to mention trying to work off all that energy between 3 and 5ish each afternoon!

Spying.

Walking down the hill to the car at the end of that first week of school (mama very ready for daddy to come home!). Such preciousness makes the endless exhaustion totally worthwhile, doesn't it?

holidays and field trips and cupcakes, oh my!

Well, we're now several weeks into first grade. So much for catching up on Kindergarten posts before school started. And more about first grade very soon. But first, let's finish up this first year of "real" school, shall we?

Like other holidays, turns out I blogged about Valentine's Day over on my other blog, if you're interested in the valentines we made for school buddies this past year. Good way to use up old, broken crayons!

The kids celebrated other holidays with more craft projects, like hats and beards for St. Patrick's Day.

And there were a few more field trips. 

He's posing here with one of his best buddies, Finn (who also happens to be in his class this year).

Daphne tagged along on this one to Fairyland.

Easter was celebrated with an egg hunt in the school's garden and a party back in the classroom.

Toward the end of the school year, with Daphne in part-time daycare, I was able to finally volunteer at school, some weeks with the Kindergarten-only motor skills class. A very blurry Elias is on the red ball on the right. I'm kind of bummed this is only during Kindergarten - it was a bit old-school but at least it got the kids moving every week (unlike PE, which they only had once a week, every other week!).

That's the cruel irony (or is it a paradox? I don't know...) of being an essentially stay-at-home parent. Unless all your kids are in school (in which case, score!), it's tough to take advantage of all that time you have on your hands with an infant or toddler in tow. So I tried to volunteer once a week once Daphne was in part-time daycare. Of course, now that she's no longer in daycare (more about that in a bit), I'm trying to volunteer once a week with her tagging along. We'll see how it goes...

Classroom science project. I really appreciated that the lower grades did classroom projects since we didn't get too far on the one we started at home. I kept the project-in-progress, though, so maybe this year?

Sitting next to his buddy Kingston at the Dads' Club sponsored annual pancake breakfast, showing off the latest gap in his smile. He's lost 6 teeth so far, the latest one just this week!

A field trip to the Chabot Space & Science Center while Daphne was at daycare. Even so, I was still exhausted by the end of this one!

This was also the location of our first field trip this school year and Elias seems pretty into space these days. In fact, just a day or two ago he told me he wants to be an astronaut when he grows up, but "the kind that studies space from Earth."

Okay, I know this is getting really long and rambling, but ... chicks! There were chicks!

So cute! I think this is another thing only Kindergarteners get to enjoy - learning about the incubation process and life cycle of the chicken and all that - but we'll see this spring if there are chicks to be had in the first grade classroom. I'm guessing, however, that this is one of the many ways 1st grade is different than Kindergarten.

Comparing water bottles before the school's walk-a-thon, one of many fundraisers.

We celebrated summer birthdays (including Elias') during the second to last week of school. Journie, the gal sitting next to Elias, is also a summer birthday and is in his class again this year.

The class performed a short play with their 3rd grade "buddies." Elias' part was King Lion.

Elias is in the center of this picture, waiting for the play to begin. I believe his first grade buddy, Nick, is standing to the left of him (his right). 3rd graders are so much bigger than Kindergarteners!

And finally, graduation!

We got to take home some projects the kids had worked on all year.

All the students received a certificate and I was sort of shocked to learn, given the number of stomach bugs Elias had last winter, that he had perfect attendance, earning him a second certificate!

There were cupcakes, of course.

Seems like just yesterday ... I'm going to get started on my first 1st grade post right away!

Kindergarten - 100 Days of School

For Elias' 100th day of Kindergarten, all the kids in his class were invited to make and wear t-shirts with 100 items on them.

Elias chose googly eyes on a blue shirt.

Here he is posing with a few of his fellow Kinders:

Man, those 100 days went by fast but not nearly as quickly as the 80 or so that followed, especially since this is right around the time Daphne started daycare. More about that in a separate post. Coming up: fun with a heart motif!

Kindergarten - extracurricular activities (part 3)

Okay, so turns out I wrote about the major holidays last year (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas) and there wasn't a whole lot more to report in terms of school-sanctioned celebrations.

So let's just move right along to extracurricular activities.

We made cupcakes for the bake sale at the Harvest Fest, the school's main fundraising event held at the beginning of the year. As a first-time co- room parent I felt the timing was less than ideal, but I figure I'll be less shocked when the event comes around this year, just weeks into the school year.

For this year's ArtSPARK, a fundraising event hosted by the school between Thanksgiving and Christmas (a fundraiser because they auction off artwork donated by local artists), the theme was "up, up, and away" and Elias decided he wanted to make a flying hamburger. So we did and I wrote all about it on my more crafty blog.

I guess it was kinda his first art show? I'll admit it was one of those projects that probably had way more of my assistance than is ideal, but he had such a specific idea of what he wanted to make, I just couldn't help but facilitate. For his science project, on the other hand, when he quickly lost interest, I told him we could save what we'd done for next year. So hopefully I struck a good balance of helping him realize his goals this first year of "real school" without doing all the hard work for him.

As I mentioned in one of the earlier Kindergarten posts, Elias was in a part-time after-school program for the first few months of the year, with the idea that those two days would be my solid work days once Daphne started daycare after her first birthday. Even though the kids would get outside each day, it's a mostly sedentary, indoor program, and that was one of the hardest parts about this first year of school - getting used to being inside, sitting, for most of the day after spending at least half of the day outside during preschool. He's got a lot of physical energy to burn between 3 and 5 or so. When I picked him up around 5 he'd have this weird mix of mental exhaustion coupled with a lot of bottled up physical energy. Not a good mix. But in the meantime, he made this cool superhero self-portrait for the programs semi-annual showcase!

Hooray for new friends! We only stayed in good touch with a couple of kids from preschool, sadly, considering none of us actually moved (and his best buddy from preschool recently moved back east). But man, it's really challenging to hang out with kids outside of your kid's school! Anyway, here he is with Finn, one of his best buddies from Kindergarten who will also be in his 1st grade class, which is helping to ease some of those back-to-school anxieties after what has been a pretty fun-filled summer.

This school has monkey bars, too. Phew. I think I'll wrap this one up here and save the 100 days project, Valentines, etc., for separate posts. Stay tuned - hopefully I'll manage to finish this series of posts before 1st grade starts!

Kindergarten - settling in (part 2)

It's funny, I don't feel like I really settled into a solidly comfortable routine with school until toward the end of the year, perhaps because Daphne was changing so much each month, and I "went back to work" (more about that later) about half-way through the year but ironically pulled Elias from his two days of the after-school program at that time. I feel like every few weeks something shifted or changed with at least one member of the family. To that end, Neal traveled in one-week chunks for work for three weeks total over those first couple of months of school. Managing the shift from a long, leisurely, flexible preschool day to a slightly shorter day with specific drop-off and pick-up times, trying to get little sister down for two naps within those 5 to 6 hours, and realizing quickly on that Elias would need a solid block of burning off all that energy between the end of his school day and dinner time, and doing all this solo off and on, was, well, challenging. I didn't anticipate the Kindergarten learning curve for parents! Oh, and I volunteered to be co- room parent with another gal who is the mother of one of the kids who turned out to be one of Elias' best buddies this past year. So, yeah.

Anyway, here are a couple of images from those first couple of months of settling in:

Ah, construction. I'm not sure what the city of Oakland is up to, but they've been working on it for over a year now. When I drove to the school earlier this week to register Elias for the coming year and find out who his 1st grade teacher would be, the road I usually turn down was totally blocked off and half of the street parallel to school was filled with construction trucks, cones, etc. Awesome!

The first project on the hallway bulletin board. At this point, apparently, Elias liked library time best. Elias is wearing that same shirt in so many of the images from the first couple of months, as well as in this video where he's performing the goodbye song they sang at the end of each school day:



Elias' only homework this first year of school was to read or be read to each night for 15 to 20 minutes (something we do anyway) and, once each week, to draw a picture, preferably with a story to go along with it, in his "homework book" - one of the items in the backpack that was stolen from our car one afternoon outside martial arts practice toward the end of the school year.

Yep, I was pretty bummed. Fortunately I took pictures of several pages as we went along and he still had a towering pile of projects by June.

A cool community art project that lines the fence around the school's garden, one of the enrichment programs paid for by parents' donations to the school. In addition to garden (and reading/writing & math, of course), the school offers art, science, library, motor skills, and PE. PE is offered just once a week every other week which is insane to me. These kids need at least an hour of PE every day. But that's a topic for a whole 'nother blog post...

Bike day! Bike day is fuzzy because it was at the beginning of the year but there were a handful of weekend events like this at the school throughout the year. The school has a pretty active and yet fairly laidback parent/volunteer community, which is one thing I do really like about the school. Most people who go to this school love it. I haven't quite fallen in love with it but there are some pretty important things I appreciate about it and this is one of them.

Bathtime shenanigans. Neal typically handles 99% of Elias' bedtime routine ever since we added Daphne to the mix, but this must've been one of the nights he was out of town during those first few weeks of school. Ah, the final stretch of a long day of solo parenting...Up next, holiday shenanigans!