Cheerful Abundance

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. But these jeans were only a month old!

I told myself, when I started blogging again, that I wouldn’t talk about work (boring), or current events (everyone has an opinion; no need to share them). But this week is kicking my ass, and making me want to curl up into a little ball in the middle of my bed and just not move for a while. Like, a few years worth of ‘while’, lying completely still and motionless. And without thoughts. That’s normal, right?

Speaking of normal, this past Sunday was the deadline for kindergarten applications, which means I am spending this week haunting our mailbox for our official letter. We are hoping the kids’ got into a selective enrollment school, whose PTA website I have scoured thoroughly, and whose denizens I have judged to be the kind of people who drink top shelf liquor for no reason and really care about education (good), but might be helicopter parents who are overly invested in their kids’ experiences in life (bad). PTA at this school could be a full time job and/or a byzantine political nightmare, but the academic and social resources offered there are beyond anything in the regular school system.

But… but. Always a but. We started the kids in baseball this week, and it turns out everyone on their team either is currently, or slated to attend, our neighbourhood elementary school, and I met some of the moms and really liked them. You know when people are just nice, in that decent sort of way that makes you feel happy for just having met them? That kind of nice. The chill kind of people that make PTA kind of a fun thing to volunteer for.  And those would be our parent friends if we stuck with the neighbourhood school. So now I don’t know what we want, or what our options are, and somewhere, on its way to me, is a letter that tells me that all the ridiculous of the kindergarten process is officially over, and we have been sorted, Hogwarts-style, into an academic academy for the next 6 years.

My anxiety level about this school thing is off the charts, in part because, with a six weeks left in the school year, we are starting to feel pretty pushed out of our old school. Lots of parents who all seem to have accidentally lost our contact information when they realized we moved to a new town, albeit one just scant blocks away from school property. The school officials know we aren’t coming back, but they keep asking! It is a delicate dance, these conversations. I don’t want to tell them why we aren’t coming back, because my kids are still there, and I want them to be coddled and adored. And the school wants us back, but I suspect only for our tuition money. We went to a school event this past week, where I practiced what might be my greatest social skill (eavesdropping), and where I picked up some huge gossip about why the principal is leaving, and how the PTA has become a house divided, as two large Irish families fight for dominance and control over it. That might be it’s own entry in the next few days, the massive politicking and strategery going on to wrest control and enact change in …. oh, yes. A small parochial elementary school with less than 100 students. Oh, power. Oh, glory!

IN other, stress-related news, our old house officially went on the market this week, and so far, I am obsessively checking RedFin, to see how many strangers have favourited it. So far? Seven! We are practically giving it away, and hopefully someone walks in, feels the fabulous karma we left behind, and buys it immediately. When our realtor sent us the photos, we feel in love with it. Amazing what a wide angle lens and a lot of cleaning up can do to make a place look way, way better than it ever did when you lived in it.

That is our week, in a nutshell. Baseball, school letters, real estate. A giant basket of first-world problems that make me ashamed of how low some of my late night hopes are aimed.