Back to School

Thursday was the first day of school for the boys. Yes, you read that right, Thursday was the first day of school. Because we’re in Fort Mac.

Why else would you start the school year on a Thursday which, by the way, happens to preceed a long weekend. Oh yes, and Fridays are half days too.

Uh huh. The first week of school consisted of one and a half days. Which in hindsight might actually have been a good thing.

Upon coming home from work, I asked each of the three boys how their days had gone.

Thomas replied that it was good.
Samuel replied that it was ok
Michael replied that it was bad.

Which kind of even’s itself out to ok in a mathematical type sense, but doesn’t really help when reality is put into place.

I’m not quite sure what was so bad for Mikey. The things that I have managed to place together are

1) That they only get 15 mins for recess and 20 mins of time outside for lunch. The rest of lunch is apparently spent eating, sitting at your desk. And you’re not allowed to leave.
2) That he had to do work on his first day. Under later interrogation Mikey declared, “At St Thomas the first day was easy, and even the first week we didn’t have to do much, but here we had to do work on the first day!”

Later that night, whilst Caroline was out, I got to sit down stairs and overhear Mikey in tears as he complained about just how bad school was to Sam. No amount of reasoning from me was ever going to help him get over that. Telling a distressed 10 year old that things would be better in a couple of weeks is as successful as asking a starving lion to please wait 10 minutes before devouring the ripe juicy carcass that has just been made available to it.

I was both saddened and amused when I heard him start plotting the different ways in which he could manage to not end up there on the following day.

I hoped that the fact that the second day of school being a half day would mean that things wouldn’t go too badly. Thomas told me his day was ok again, Sam said it was worse and there were certainly no signs of improvement when I spoke to Michael.

Sam dissolved into tears when he said that he had homework to do. I told him that he’s really good at doing his homework and so that shouldn’t be too much of an issue. The the waterworks really started as he told me that he was going to have to do all his writing in cursive! More futile placating of small child followed.

On the upside for Friday, we did manage to buy a Wii system yesterday. Something of a triumph when you consider that I must have stopped at at least 12 different stores to try and get one between Calgary and Fort Mac (including the entire bloody West Edmonton Mall) only to be told on every occasion … we don’t have any in stock.

This would have been much better in terms of making kids happy if we were ready to plug it in! We did also get our keys to our house on Friday, so that was exciting. Of course, once again, it would be more exciting if we were in a position to live there! But so far, our freight is still locked up in Toronto. If they haven’t released it when I get to talk to them on Tuesday, I might well have to fly Caroline (and kids?) down there to do it for us!

Anyway, on the school front, at least it’s a long weekend and so we can sell the fact that week two becomes really only three and a half days of school.

Just remember, all of this has come on the back of ‘the bombshell’. Life’s a bit tense right now. Lucky I get to come into work on Saturday and relax!?