the underwear drawer

school daze

The first two school visits went all right. It took a little time for Cal to get warmed up at the first one--and by "warmed up," I mean it took him a while to stop crying "NO!" and running for the door. Luckily, he did calm down eventually, aided no doubt by the fact that the classroom had a THOMAS TRAIN SET. Actually, I didn't see any actual Thomas, nor any of the other primary characters--possibly they have been "borrowed" over the years and are sitting in some kid's closet somewhere. It was mainly these weird tertiary characters, like Neville and Skarloey and whatnot. Who the hell is Skarloey? I think I missed that one where Thomas and Percy mocked his paint job and pushed him into the bog, or something equally antisocial.

The schools we applied to are all pretty different, and we have to feel them out after all is said and done and figure out what would be best for Cal and for us. The setups range from half-day preschools to full days in a more daycare-type environment at some of the hospital-affiliated centers. On one hand, I like the diverse group of kids at the hospital-affiliated place (since many of the parents are rotating through [Big Academic Hospital] and the CDC, there are kids from all over the world) but I think that it's overall a little less structured, and that the 8 to 10 hour day would be a little long for Cal. On the other hand, some of the other schools we applied to are a little far away from where we will be living, and I don't necessarily want Cal to be commuting for half an hour each way to preschool either, especially if it's not Joe or me driving him. So anyway, we still have four schools left to see, hopefully there will be a happy medium and a spot for the boy by the end of the summer.

In other news--the paperwork for the townhouse we are renting is done. Joe is going to drop off our deposit with the realtor on Friday, for a lease to start in mid-April. Though we won't be physically moving in until July, we wanted to compromise on the start date of the lease since we won't have a chance to do any house-hunting in person after this week, and don't want to create a situation where we're living out of a hotel for weeks while we're looking for somewhere more permanent to live. Anyway, it's a really nice place, a great in-between between living an apartment and the shirt-rending TERROR of living in a free-standing home (in my opinion), and in an urban enough neighborhood that we will be able to walk to the supermarket, shops, restaurants, and Piedmont Park, which is like the Central Park of Atlanta. Anyway, it's cool. We're really excited.