Sending the Boys Off to a New School

Today is the second day of the new California schools for the boys. We went by on Monday and registered them, and they started at their respective schools yesterday. Registering them took a little longer than we expected, because the fifth grade at the local school is full, so he has to be "bussed" to the closest school with a spot. It turns out that the new school is only a very short distance from the first one, so location-wise that's not a problem. It was a little disappointing for us to keep driving by the neighborhood school all last weekend and talking it up as "the school", and then find out that it wasn't "the school" at all. However, the school he attends now seems very nice.

Jericho is going to the local intermediate school, which is a 7th and 8th grade school. He was mostly excited about going yesterday, and a little nervous. Jacob was just...nervous. However, after school, it was Jacob who asked if he could stay next year and go to this same school, because he likes it a lot. According to him, it's "easy", and "not complicated", and plus it has all kinds of school sports teams, and of course he's all about that.

Jericho seemed neutral about his school. He said that the kids were "mostly nice" except for the one kid who apparently "punched him in the stomach" as Jericho held the door to go into one of his classes. Jericho said this in a very aside way, and it was all I could do to not drive up to the school and report this as soon as I heard it, or at least fixate on it for the rest of the day. However, the teacher side in me knows that there are just loser kids at schools that do this kind of thing just for kicks, and it most likely won't happen again. I have also learned in my 12 short years of parenting that's there's usually no reason to get upset about something happening to your child unless it happens more than once. This covers a veritable plethora of occurrences that can happen children: crying for a really long time when they go to bed, bad nightmares, rashes, mean friends, etc. When it first happens, it's easy to dwell on "what if this starts happening all the time?", and it usually doesn't.

Doesn't that sound wise and calm and level-headed? However, let it be known now, if it happens again today, I am SO up at that school at 2:26 this afternoon.

In general, it is really hard to send my boys off to places that are completely unknown to me, where they don't have any friends yet, and all kind of things might happen. However, there's really not too much I can do about those situations - at least right now when I'm at home. Plus, I do think they are clever and friendly and fun to be around, and surely the other kids will realize that, too.