Life As A One-School Family

We all go—all five of us—to the same school every day. At home we have been at as many as 4 different schools—a preschool, two elementary schools (one for teaching and one for learning) and a middle school. We’ll have that again when we go back, only with two middle schools and two elementary schools.

But right now, we all walk three blocks to ONE school. This takes about ten minutes, or 15 when the boys (we’ve picked up a friend along the way) walk slow. Which is most days. Getting out of the house is its own issue with Mommy and Daddy invariably FRUSTRATED!! because we need to be there before our students and one or another of the kids dawdling along. Once we arrive, drop-off consists of a 10-yard detour to one child’s locker, a hug and a kiss in the stairwell for another, and with the third there IS no drop-off, as we share a classroom. We all see each other throughout the day at recess, lunch, in the teachers’ room, passing in the hallway…we’ve never been so together for so long. It’s like camp, but we get to go home together every day for whatever dinner we can summon the energy to cook.

Even more interesting is the effect on our dinner conversation. There’s no opportunity for the usual “What did you do today at school?” “Nothing, I don’t know,” interchange—because we’ve seen all the teachers at least once and we know all their friends and we’ve even been in class with them. So we TALK. There has never been so much conversation about what they’ve been doing. We talk about funny things that happened in class, injuries on the playground (see my previous posting on playgrounds for thoughts about that), what we learned…it’s great to know that we can as a family have conversation about what we like and what interests us and what’s frustrating. It’s possible (likely, even) that we won’t ever have an extended time like this again. What a blessing that we get to take advantage of this experience together for this year!