Jamisen started transitional Kindergarten this year. Normally this wouldn't have been a huge deal since most school districts still do half days for TK. But, where we live our district is the only one that has moved it to a full day schedule. That means he goes from 8:45am - 3:15pm with an early dismissal at 1:40 on Wednesdays. Talk about a long day for the little kids!! For that reason I was super nervous and emotional about sending him. I never thought I would be that mom that cried when he went off to school but it really is an emotional thing. Something about starting a new chapter and knowing that from here on out they are going to grow up so fast. I realized how precious those first 5 years with them are. Now he will spend as much time with a teacher as with me. The night of orientation I was getting all teary-eyed listening to the teacher talk. At the end I went up to her to ask a basic question and I was all choked up trying to get it out. Jeff was at my side thinking "pull it together!" Haha, we laughed about it afterwards as I was totally embarrassed but I figure it's probably pretty normal for first time moms. I told myself that I would take him out whenever I felt like he needed a break or just keep him home some days since it wasn't really "mandatory" school. Overall he transitioned pretty well. It was cute to hear him come home and tell me about friends he was meeting. We ended up having a rocky start at our local school and finally moved him to another school nearby after several incidents. We were already on the fence about our school because it's rated a 6 and really run down but I'm a big believer in supporting your local schools and building them up. However, too many red flags kept coming up in the first two weeks that we finally moved him to another school that is a 10, has great facilities, and we had heard wonderful things about. The first issue was that we heard his teacher would be gone a lot. She was absent the first week of school and one morning some of the moms from last year stopped us and told us TK moms that we will not see her a lot this year because she was absent most of last year taking are of her ill husband. This was hard to hear since at this age stability and consistency is so important and I didn't want Jamisen having new subs all year. They also said she was just really burnt out from years of teaching and the emotional toll of needing to be at school even though her heart was really at home where she wanted to be taking care of her sick husband. However, we kept with it and then another red flag came when one day I came to pick him up after school and it was just chaos. There were tons of kids everywhere all mixed together and no order or system to picking your child up. You pretty much just had to spot them and pluck them out of the crowd. I went up to his teacher and said, "Hi! Where is Jamisen?" She said, "Um he is somewhere!" This was not what a parent wants to hear and made my stomach drop. He really stands out at our school with his white hair and I thought anyone could come by and easily take him home. So I started looking everywhere for him and his teacher said, "I can tell you he didn't cross the street", as if that was a big consolation. After a few minutes of looking Jamisen suddenly popped up at my side! I was grateful he found me but not too happy with the picking up process. The final straw was when Jeff dropped Jamisen off one morning and came home and said, "It doesn't seem very safe." This was the final confirmation I needed to know that we needed to move him to a better school. At first it was hard moving him but in the end it turned out to be the best decision. Jamisen has told me on several occasions he likes his new school way better. He has two teachers that team teach so one of them is always there, they have a safe check in and check out process where the parent has to come to the door of the classroom and then they release each child one at a time, and the school itself is so much nicer. The funny thing is that I never talked to the other moms about us doing a transfer, but apparently they were all feeling the same way because lo and behold, after moving to the new school I ran into 3 other moms that also asked for a transfer from our home school. I learned from this experience to trust in that mom instinct more. I kept having lots of things come up that made me feel unsettled about where he was going but I ignored them telling myself that I was being a crazy, over protective mom and that this must be how real school is, since I had nothing to compare it to. However, when I would talk to more experienced moms they all told me that was not normal and I should move him. I'm so glad that we did because he has had a wonderful year and grown so much at the new school.
