Meet The Teachers

We went to Annie's school this morning to meet her teachers, who seem to be two very lovely, patient women and who told me kindly but in no uncertain terms that we shall not speak of whether Annie will go to Young 5's or Kindergarten next year until spring conferences. I told them I will do my best not to think about it until then, either.

Annie (and Jemma too, frankly) absolutely loved her classroom. It is huge, almost twice the size of last year, but more importantly: The Dolls. THE DRESS-UP CLOTHES. While I sat at a tiny table in a tiny chair that made my dress ride up inappropriately and heard about the year, Annie played silently and steadily for 30 minutes. When I asked if she wanted to go out to the playground at the end, she said no. She wanted to stay in the classroom all day. My fear has never really been that Annie wouldn't love school (she really does); it is that she is going to want to have very little to do with singing songs and talking about shapes and colors because, again, THE DRESS-UP CLOTHES. Bins and bins of them . . .

I spent the rest of the day shooting down to South Haven to hastily trim the hedges with a rusted clippers from 1904 (and I think my whole upper body is really going to remember that tomorrow) and clean the house up now that our friend/renter has mostly moved out. He is sort of a friend from when we lived there, was going through a divorce, and needed a place for July and August. While it was great to have someone paying rent and watching over the place for two months, I believe the house hasn't actually been cleaned AT ALL in that two-month span, either. And since we have someone coming on Friday for a second showing (do not speak of this aloud or surely it will not happen), I wanted to clean it asap. I will just say: dog hair, toilets, dog hair.

So I am sweaty, sore, and dirty. And now that it is 8:43, I will go downstairs and inform my just-home-from-work husband that sadly, no, I do not have a plan for dinner, Bad Wife that I am. (I had the Bad Mommy thing going for a while, too, but I finally redeemed myself by calling to schedule Annie for a long-overdue dental cleaning AND a four-year checkup at her pediatrician's.)