The children in my daughter’s class, 3-5 year olds all, have been growing more and more familiar with things like armies, guns, and violence. The classroom is experiencing a lot of play involving mock-guns. One of the teachers created a transcript of the conversation she had with the kids, and it was interesting to hear what they are getting out of their parents, media, peers, and stories. I’ve left out most of the names, except for my daughter Erin. She’s been on the Internet before.

The garage is piled high with cardboard boxes, distaff from Christmas morning. The boxes used to hold promises, now they hold styrofoam and packing peanuts, refuse I’m too lazy to properly discard.

With some time on my hands, and two kids in my face, I opted for activity over indolence.

“Let’s get some scissors,” I said. And then sprang into action.

Happy January, everyone. Or, as parents of the under-6 crowd have come to know and love it: Kindergarten Application Season.

Hooray! Crank the stress-o-meter up to 10 (not 11. 11 is awesome and this is not awesome.), fill out paperwork, memorize deadlines, schedule tours and parent info nights. Get on the ball before the ball runs you over.

(Actually, Kindergarten Application Season began, for many of us, in October, as schools tried to get even farther ahead of the game by scheduling info nights and campus tours months ahead of the application deadline. I hate them.)

Now, when I was growing up I lived on army bases, in small towns, or on a reservation. With the exception of being bused over the bridge to attend a school that offered French, I always just went to whatever public school was nearby. I don’t know if my parents wished they’d had the resources, or opportunities, to send me to private schools, to charter schools, to specialty schools, to higher-performing-out-of-district schools; I’ve never felt like I missed out on something. But maybe my parents did.

It’s thoughts like that, and falling for the conversations with other parents about our neighbourhood school that have them saying about it “Yeah…it’s not…uh…great….”, that influence me to strongly consider sending my daughter to a private or charter school in her upcoming kindergarten year. Why can’t I just relax about it, save the money and the time and just wash my hands of it all?

Here’s the war going on in my head:

Surely the money going into private schools, or the passion going into charter schools, must have a positive effect on education in those schools, I offer.

Surely it’s just class-warfare riddled with racist undertones to think that public school is bad for my kids, I think right back.

Surely if I have the resources available, I should use them to give my child the best education possible, I think, possibly fallaciously, in response.

Surely whatever the public school lacks can be made up in my own effort and I would make that effort if I really cared about my kids, I snap.

Surely no family is better off if the parents are over-scheduling their kids because the school they attend isn’t meeting whatever educational or extra-curricular goals the parents have, I mutter.

Surely it’s parents, and the kids themselves, that make education in the younger grades a success or a failure and at the end of the day that’s the real difference, I think to myself, wondering if it’s a platitude.

Don’t call me Shirley, everyone else thinks.

I don’t know how the Kindergarten Wars will end in our house (or in my head). All I can do is prepare the earthworks, line the hills with machine gun emplacements, and wait for the shelling to stop before charging across the field toward the Germans on the other side. (I may also have to stop playing Call of Duty…it’s infecting everything.) I trust that we will do what we feel is right, and that is going to have to be enough.

MORE ON BABBLE:

19 lessons I learned in (my kid’s) kindergarten
Preschool tutors and kindergarten test prep … what’s next?!
The top 5 ways to get your kid ready for kindergarten
Are public schools good enough for your kids?
Is my 4.9-year-old ready for kindergarten? To red-shirt or not to red-shirt.

She ran into the bedroom early, too early, in the morning to shake me awake and make her demands. “Daddy! Can I play Kirby? I really want to play Kirby.” My technophile daughter had a jones on for a Wii game she’d been playing since Christmas.

I am not opposed to kids using television or video games or computers or most technology, but even I, wannabe gamer raising a gamer girl in a gamer world, had to draw the line somewhere. I’d found it. It was at 9 am on a Sunday morning, before anyone had eaten breakfast and before I was even fully awake.

With the kids home for far, far too long over the holiday break, we decided to use some of our “family time” to sit in a dark room with a bright light and fifty chattering three year olds and their shh-ing parents. That is, we went to the movies!

My daughter has seen and loved both Alvin and the Chipmunks and Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel and I have, well, seen them. She noticed the posters advertising Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked over the last month and kept announcing: “ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS IS COMING SOON TO THEATERS!!!” Don’t let anyone ever tell you that advertising to kids is a waste of money.

So we took the kids to see this third, possibly eye-bleeding and brain-melting entry, and…I…well…I liked it. Damn.

Hahahahahahahaha. So. Previously, on Parenting Off the Map, I told the long, sordid, tragic tale of a man who was getting his butt kicked by Christmas Eve, letting it get to him, and going crazy. Think of this one as an update of that one.

The Christmas tree scraped my left eye. This was annoying, in a do-I-have-tree-sap-in-there kind of way. It was bothering me a little during the evening, and late, late at night as I assembled the kids’ gifts. But it didn’t feel too bad.

Ha! Hahahahahahahahahaha. So many laughters.

All I wanted was a Christmas tree. We had returned from vacation two days before Christmas, and the thought of waking up on Christmas morning to an empty living room inspired aching sadness in me. I could not let it happen to my kids, to me. Mostly to me. It was all about me. I needed the day to be perfect.

My Voltaire was rusty, or I’d have remembered that the perfect is the enemy of the good. Instead, I almost ruined Christmas.

My son halted his ascent up the iron staircase just short of the platform that was his goal. If he could make it there, he would have access to the train engineer’s vantage and he would flip his lid. He loves trains, and he loves this park, Dennis the Menace Park in Monterey, and he was about to combine the two into one massive toddler smorgasbord.

But as he neared the top he grew nervous, and he froze. He was unsure of his balance, and it occurred to him just how high he was, and so he started calling for my help.

I didn’t budge. I am a Satellite Parent, and there was no need to send in the troops just yet. But the mom with one kid in a front-carrier and the other patrolled by a nanny just could not take it. 

There is a strange study showing up online this week about kids and broccoli. Entitled “Offering “Dip” Promotes Intake of a Moderately-Liked Raw Vegetable among Preschoolers with Genetic Sensitivity to Bitterness”, the study is sourced to the Journal of the American Dietetic Association and looks into the problem of getting bitter-sensitive kids to eat broccoli.

Luckily, Hidden Valley Ranch dressing is here to save the day!

Wait, what?

PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) unveiled a new campaign just in time for Thanksgiving.

Unfortunately, PETA has fallen for one of the classic blunders (apart from “Never get involved in a land war in Asia” and “Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha a ha?”) and it might very well be the dogs of America who suffer for it.