The Whole Watermelon

I'm surviving Kindergarten. My daughter is doing great, but I'm having a bit of a problem adjusting to the new regime. It's hard being expected to be somewhere on time everyday! Preschool was a lot less forgiving if I showed up 5 min late every third time. But in kindergarten there's consequences for tardiness. They wrote out said consequences for me on a sheet of paper in the welcome to school packet. The consequences are bad. I could get called into the principle's office if I don't tow the line. I've already had to check my daughter in late once, because I forgot about Friday early-out day, which for afternoon kindergarten is actually early-in and early-out day. I can only hope it won't go on my permanent record.

My biggest complaint is definitely picking up my daughter and the other kids in the carpool twice a week. Today I arrived at the school about 6 minutes before the final bell rang, at approx 2:19. I arrived back at home at 2:50 PM. I live 1.3 miles away. To put in in perspective, it takes me 4 min to drive to school and drop off my child for afternoon kindergarten (which is pleasantly uncrowded at that time of day). It takes me 31 min to do the reverse.

When we bought this house, I saw the shiny elementary school across the street and assumed that my daughter and future children would be attending that school. I checked the school's boundary maps to make sure our house was included, and checked the test scores of this school against several others in the area. Everything checked out, and I felt secure purchasing the house. After we moved in, our neighbors told me they had lost the fight some time ago, and the kids in our neighborhood were being bused to another school because the newer housing somehow won the right to attend that school. Our subdivision had been kicked out. The boundary maps on the school district's web site were apparently out of date, making all of my careful research useless. I took deep breaths and told myself that since my daughter was only 6 months old, plenty of things could change before it was time for her to go to kindergarten.

Flash forward 5 years. They've built another Elementary School, which is closer to the one the kids in the neighborhood had been bused to, but still not as close as the taunting school across the street. This new school is 1.3 miles of walking distance away, however, they calculate distance as if our children fly to school, and that makes our home under 1 mile away. Thus my kindergarten age daughter is within "walking distance" of the school, despite the fact that she would have to cross two very busy and dangerous steets to get there. No matter what label they place on the distance, there is no way on earth my child is walking it, and I've settled for the best solution I can find. Carpooling.

So here's how carpooling works at my school. I'm curious to know if this genius system is implemented everywhere, or if my school has a market on the most frustrating experience in existence. I arrive at the school 6 minutes before the final bell rings. I park two blocks away at the end of the line of cars waiting to pick kids up in the "car pool" lane. There is also a "drive-through" lane, but there is supposed to be no stopping in that lane. I wait for 10 minutes for children to start trickling out of the school. The people who camped out in their cars the night before start picking up their kids at the front of the line. We inch up a few spaces as a couple of cars leave from the front. But then we run into a problem. Some people follow the line of cars to the "pickup area" at the front of the school. But others have their kids just start walking until they see their car. So we've got some people waiting, some people trying to inch up, people leaving the "carpool" lane to jam their way into the "drive-through" lane, and people in the "drive-through" lane trying to jam their way into spaces that are left by deserters in the "carpool" lane. So people like me, whose carpool children have been trained by my other carpool partners to wait by the tree, are left to judge whether cars are going to pull up, or if I have to hop over them to an empty space. Then I have to venture into the "drive-through" lane and hope that someone won't steal the open spot before I get there. I don't want to hop prematurely and lose my place in the line that's not really a line. By the time I jump around all the people whose children have walked to them by this point, and make my way to the pick-up tree place, I'm always one of the last people to be picking up my kids.

To make matters worse, I got a talking to from the aide today for breaking procedure. Apparently, despite the fact that I got out of the car to walk my child from the sidewalk to the driver-side passenger door, children are only allowed to enter the vehicle from the side closest to the sidewalk. In exasperation (more from the whole experience than this one particular annoyance), I voiced my irritation to the aide that I have 6 kids (2 of which are already buckled in car seats in the car) to cram in the back of my mini-van and having them all enter through one door, and forcing half of them to crawl over my buckled children doesn't make life any easier. "It's for her own safety" was her snide reply. Well you know what? If the school were really concerned about my daughter's safety, maybe they could find a nice safe little yellow bus to come pick her up and take her to her house, a very un-safe 1.3 miles of "walking distance" away.

After I chaotically yet "safely" load all the children in the van, I get to join the long line of cars waiting to get onto the busy streets our children would be forced to walk if they didn't have parents who were willing to face the brutality every day. I'm always at the end of the line. And we wait. A long time. One of the girls in the carpool tells me that she and her friend ran an experiment, which concluded that the kids could walk home faster than they could be picked up and driven home. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that's how they calculated their "walking distance".

This same neighbor girl let me in on her Mom's secret. "She just comes really late" she said with a smile, "that way she doesn't have to deal with the long line." The funny thing is, her Mom has gotten my child home earlier than every day I've tried. Sometimes it's 2:40, sometimes 2:45, but never 2:50. And she's doesn't waste all the gas I do, idling in the hot summer heat for 3o min.

Thank goodness for carpooling. I don't think I could handle this 5 days a week..

My review of Breaking Dawn (I posted it on goodreads.com)

*WARNING* It does contain major SPOILERS!!

Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer

rating: 3 of 5 stars

*Warning* SPOILERS AHEAD

I love happy endings, but sometimes you have to sacrifice a little happy for the good of the story. This book lacked depth, and I found it really disappointing. There was a serious lack of the deep emotion that I found drawn to in her previous novels. This seemed more like a 600 page epilogue to the other novels than a novel itself.

To fully understand my disappointment, you might need to hear my expectations. From an e-mail I wrote before the release of Breaking Dawn:

Thoughts on Breaking Dawn:

I'm so excited for a fourth novel! I predict that Bella will stall a little bit before changing, but I think she will eventually get married and have Edward be the one to do the biting. I have no idea how the consummating will go. I'm not sure if Stephenie's going to go into too much detail and I'm not sure why Bella thinks it's going to be such a pleasant experience when she's a human. Having relations with hard cold marble ... maybe it could be pleasant, but I don't think I'd be excited about trying it.

Stephenie says she's given it a lot of thought, so I'll just let her sort out the details. I'm excited to see if Bella's a crazy newborn, and how she deals with it. I hope Stephenie details a lot of her changing. I think it could be really interesting. I keep thinking that some crazy twist is going to happen. I first thought she was going to get pregnant during her wedding night and have a 1/2 vampire baby. Stephenie shot that idea down on one of the blogs I was reading. I guess vampires can't get anyone pregnant. And if Bella were pregnant when she was turned into a vampire, she would remain that way forever. Since most of the story lines have been fairly straight forward, I doubt anything too unexpected is going to happen. I'm guessing that Bella's power to control her mind is going to be her major superpower, but I'm guessing that attracting danger isn't going to stop once she's on the other side.

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I really wish attracting danger would have followed her on as a vampire. The dangers could have been more extreme to match her new powers. That would have made the pages and pages of waiting for something to happen a lot more interesting.

I kept waiting for some conflict. First I waited for something to happen to delay the wedding or make it harder. Didn't happen. I kept waiting for something to happen to delay the honeymoon or the sex. Didn't really happen. Then I waited for some conflict to happen with the pregnancy. It happened, but we switched perspectives instead of using that opportunity to explore Bella's internal struggles with her love for something that was killing her. Then I waited for some conflict with Bella being a vampire. None really. Then I waited for some interesting character information on the new vampires. Boring. Then I waited through hundreds of pages to get to the end battle. The end battle that ended up being pages and pages of talking.

And human/vampire sex good? really? how? I feel like Stephanie turned traitor on me. How exactly did the seed get from Edward to Bella? That was never explained to my satisfaction. I thought she had it all thought out. I think I was wrong.

I also had a problem with the Bella having to drink blood during her pregnancy. It's not like the embilical cord is a straw between baby and mom's stomach. The baby should have been getting the nutrients it needed from the IV to survive, so why was it rejecting nutrients passed on from Bella when it wasn't even tasting them? Bella as a human drinking blood was creepy, and in my opinion totally unnecessary.

Their baby was really creepy. Couldn't she show a little human emotion? She was not vulnerable and seemed devoid of any emotion. As I was reading, I kept picturing her as the Chucky doll. Despite the fact that all the vampires were falling in love with her, I didn't find her to be that enduring.

Bella's love for Edward was as strong as a mother's love for a child in the earlier novels. In Breaking Dawn her love seemed more like lust than anything else, and her maternal love towards Chucky seemed a little flaky. Sometimes she was obsessed and then other times she just ignored the baby.

I thought the plot of Twilight was weak, but I enjoyed reading about the relationship between Bella and Edward enough to forgive it. I loved the emotional turmoil in New Moon. Jacob and Edward both bugged me in Eclipse, but I had high hopes for Breaking Dawn. Instead I was left with neither plot nore interesting characters. My disappointment is overwhelming.

I still like Stephenie's writing, but I feel like she dropped the ball on this one. I get the sense that she got too attached to her characters and wanted everything to end perfectly for them. I wanted that too, but not really. Really I wanted to feel some conflict, some pain, and some character growth.


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It's 1 AM, an hour past when I usually go to bed, and I'm sitting here writing this post. I talked myself out of walking to the car to get the book I just checked out of the library. Why am I looking for excuses to stay up? My best guess is that I'm having issues with my oldest child starting kindergarten tomorrow. Technically she does not start until Tue, but tomorrow she goes in for 45 min to meet her teacher and get tested. I've heard stories about Mom's getting cold feet when it's time for their kids to go to school for the first time, but I thought I was going to be ok. I have pretty much convinced myself that it's just like preschool, only 5 days a week instead of 2 or 3. Nothing to worry about. Except..

I had a dream last night about kindergarten. I was a substitute for the kindergarten teacher, and I did a terrible job. One kid was being a little bit rowdy, and I felt like I needed to set an example of him so others wouldn't follow his lead. I decided to take him to the principle's office, and was only planning on being gone for a minute. Of course, since it was one of my dreams, it took me forever to get back. When I finally did get back, two members of my church who are actually teachers in real life were watching the class. I tried to pretend that nothing was amiss, and started teaching again, but I felt terrible and totally inadequate.

I can remember bits and pieces of my own kindergarten experience. I remember playing with the toys, and the letters hanging around the room. I remember kindergarten orientation where we got to play outside on the playground afterward. I remember loving to cut and paste. I have good feelings overall when I think about kindergarten, but I also remember a couple of bad experiences. The worst was when a someone who sat at my table was absent, and another boy at the table decided that it would be funny to distribute the missing boy's crayons amongst ourselves. We all laughed and agreed that it would be a funny trick. The next day when the boy came back, neither he nor the teacher thought it was funny, and asked who had done it. The ringleader, who had been the one to suggest it, told the teacher that I was the one who did it. I guess I was too shy to stand up for myself, because I had to go out into the hall for punishment. Not that I really minded. I remember liking being out there.

Our teacher would give us assignments to complete in class. After we were finished she would collect our pencils and then we come up to her desk in small groups to have our work graded. If we got all of the answers correct, we would get a scratch-and-sniff sticker for our paper. One day I did the assignment, she collected our pencils, and then just as I was about to go up for my work to be checked I noticed that I had answered one question incorrectly. The whole long trip up to her desk, and while waiting in line I had visions of sneaking over to the pencils, grabbing one, and quickly fixing my error, but I never worked up the courage to do it. The girl in front of me got a wonderful elephant sticker that smelled like peanuts when you scratched it. I wanted one so badly, but sure enough when I got to the front of the line I didn't say anything and my teacher marked the answer wrong. No smelly sticker for me.

Part of me wonders if I really am ready for my little girl to be off experiencing the school experiences, both good and bad, without me. Lucky for me, they are always looking for volunteers to help in the classroom, so I will hopefully be able to take advantage of some of those opportunities and be in this part of her life for a little while.

Well, blogging has made me feel better, and by better I mean sleepy. I have to be up bright and early to make her 8:15AM appt (are they crazy? She's in afternoon kindergarten for a reason people!), so I think I'm settled down enough now to go to sleep.

Wish me luck!