School Dazed

Well, there’s good new … and irksome news.

Good news first. Parent-Teacher Conference this evening with both Katherine’s regular pre-school teacher (Ms. Kim) and her speech teacher (Ms. Debbie). Lots of praise for Katherine being a very clever and communicative girl. Great drawings. Excellent results on things like knowing her numbers and letters. Praise for being open and creative and polite and all those other things that parents want to hear.

Good news as well on the speech front. Katherine’s racked up some of her baseline goals, and is making progress on the others. It’s hard for Margie and I to see the improvement, sometimes, though it’s something that both family and friends have commented on. So all’s well there.

We have her enrolled in the summer school session there at the Village, which should be fun — interesting field trips and the like. The question (which is where we get into the irksome part) is what to do in the fall.

Currently she’s in school Monday and Wednesday 12:30-3:30, and in the “Rainbow Room” in-school day care for another hour until I pick her up. We both feel that she’d benefit being at school more — socially, as well as educationally. And, for consistency sake, we’re leaning toward having her be at pre-school M-F.

The problem is, that’s where we bump into our own work schedules. Margie’s only part-time, but she’s got definite meetings she needs to be in for during the month. Right now she can handle that by having Katherine in the on-site day care at her office for the day or two a week when she needs to be in all day. I can do some occasional telecommuting, but not much — an exception rather than a rule is the rule at my company.

So … if we have her in M-F in the afternoons, I can pick her up, but the dropping her off is problematic for Margie on some days. I can do that, if need be, but not necessarily all the time that’s needed. And taking her to Margie’s office in the mornings then swinging over to the preschool at Noon is a pain in the patootie.

Or we can do M-F in the morning, but that runs into most of Margie’s meetings, requiring her to drop Katherine off at the Rainbow Room earlier than she (Katherine) is wont to be awake.

Or we can do something like all-day Monday and Wednesday (or Tuesday and Thursday), with her in the Rainbow Room half day, in class the other half. Which is less predictable, a longer “day” for her, and no increase in the amount of actual classroom time.

No immediate answers were forthcoming, and we decided to sleep on it. An embarrassment of riches regarding options, to be sure, but we’re committed to finding a way of doing what we think best for Kitten, whatever that is.