Back to school

The day after tomorrow is the first day of school. A few of Isaac's contemporaries are heading off to kindergarten, and compared to them our back-to-school experience is a bit anticlimactic. Isaac is returning to the same preschool he has attended for the last two years, although as a student in the developmental kindergarten he will at least be moving into a different classroom.

Isaac is very excited about going back to school. One of the two developmental kindergarten teachers was his circle teacher during summer school, and he loved her. (The school shortens "developmental kindergarten" to "DK," and I will do the same.) Most of the twenty DK students will be returning students; Isaac is good friends with two of them.

Last year Isaac went to preschool from 9:00 a.m. to noon three days a week; DK has the same hours, but it is held five days a week. Five days in a row of going to school. I am really not looking forward to that! You may recall my summertime complaint about the grind of having to take the kids to their swim lessons four days a week. As an adult I suffer from the same flakiness and lack of punctuality that plagued my own school days, and Isaac is probably late to school more frequently than not.

The situation is worsened by our summer hours. Yes, I did develop a structured routine to keep the household running while Craig was abroad this summer, but part of that routine involved Laurel going to bed very late. For her entire life, Laurel's natural sleep pattern has been what I call "college student hours" -- she likes to go to bed late and wake up late. For most of this summer she went to sleep at 10:30 p.m. and woke up at 9:00 a.m. For the summer it worked out great (she got a nice ten and a half hour stretch of sleep each night, plus a nap of an hour or 90 minutes each afternoon), but it sure isn't going to help Isaac get to school on time.

Isaac's schedule didn't change that much over the summer. When he was a baby and toddler he was such a terrible sleeper, but now all the drama has ended. We leave him in his darkened bedroom around 8:30 p.m. and he's asleep by 9:00. Then he wakes up in the middle of the night and comes into my bed, where he falls back asleep until 8:00 a.m.

But now it is time to re-set the clock. Time for a new schedule. Time, even, for a new regime. Calculating backwards, if I want to leave for school at 8:30 a.m., then Laurel is going to have to be asleep at 8:30 p.m. And for that to happen, I need to march into her room at 7:00 tomorrow morning and wake her up.

That's two hours earlier than she is used to. She won't be happy about it.

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And I won't be happy about my own 7:00 a.m. wake-up call either! I liked having the kids sleep until 8:00 or 9:00 every morning, because that meant I could sleep in too.