Just before Christmas I did something to my left eye. That adventure has been detailed already, here and here. Today I went back to the ophthalmologist for a follow-up appointment about what appears to have been stress-induced crazy eye. I had my eyes dilated, and stared at, and photographed with bright, bright lights again (thus the insane “I AM THE LIZARD QUEEN!” look I have in the photo) in order to determine if my problem’s origin persisted.

The news was good and bad.

My daughter has been in swimming lessons for, woah, years, now, and this means we’ve been buying swimsuits for her for, yep, years now. Once she outgrew her last toddler suit we started buying two-piece suits for her (shorts/t-shirts) because come on! Those suits are totes adorbs!

My son has also been going to swimming lessons for a couple of years now, and when he outgrew the toddler suit we bought him a pair of board shorts. Because come on! Board shorts are totes adorbs!

Then my daughter asked me: “Daddy, why are you indoctrinating me into society’s regressive dress code while at the same time claiming to be progressive, but in reality only paying lip service to any of the contributions made to gender equality by the feminist movement in the last hundred years?”

Or something like that.

So, I used to love napping. If I could squeeze in a nap between Judge Judy and Maury Pauvich of an afternoon, I would gladly do so. Sometimes I felt like I had to nap, because the kids were tiring me out, or I had to get up with them too early in the morning and so my body was owed some down time. But I haven’t had to take a nap in, oh, six months, and the difference has been entirely related to how I start the day, not when I start it.

A last-minute decision has resulted in about 300%  more work for the most-at-home parent in our house (me). It was my decision, so it’s not like anyone foisted it on me. But it’s still more work. Not parenting work. Out-of-the-house work. This has led to some changes. 

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.