Monday, November 9th was the second first day of school for Amber and Rose! Our school district is transitioning to a hybrid model, where the classes are divided in half and each half goes to school two days per week. The other three days are at-home online school. Jay is still fully online, since middle school is scheduled to start hybrid learning three weeks after the elementary schools. The high school is supposed to begin hybrid three weeks after the middle schools. More on that if/when it comes! For now, our elementary school girls are the stars of the show!
Amber and Rose are in group A, which attends school in person on Mondays and Tuesdays. We opted out of the confusing lengthy school bus rides this year, so I'm back on Mom-chauffeur service for the first time a while. Since I only have to hustle the girls into the car and drive them to school on time two days per week, it is manageable. So far. We are only two days into this scheme! And actually, day two was already rushed and reluctant. So...yeah. This is the story of easy-breezy Day One.
The girls got ready super fast and early on the first day of in-person hybrid school. We filled out their daily health attestation forms and attached them to the required lanyard. Once the girls were masked and properly labeled, it was time to go!
First came Amber. Her all-kindergarten school is a scant 2 miles from our house, and it starts 30 minutes before Rose's school. The kindergarten school's student drop-off (and pick-up) procedure requires parents to park in a side lot and walk the kid up to the school. I actually mapped the distance with my GPS watch, and it is a quarter mile round trip to walk from the parking lot to the school and back. On Monday morning, we parked in that far-off lot and walked a bouncy spring-loaded excited Amber up the long sidewalk to the school. She wore her pink boots and an old pink backpack that she claimed from the basement stash, and the purple unicorn mask that her teacher gave her.
Due to pandemic restrictions, parents were not allowed inside the school building, so when a teacher opened the school door, I stopped and Amber kept walking. She didn't look back, and it was such an abrupt separation, I started to feel a little sad. But then I remembered that this was the day we have all dreamed about for years, so I didn't distract Amber from her single-track power-walk with more superfluous goodbyes. Once her forehead temperature had been taken, she disappeared inside the school.
Rose and I walked back to the car together. It was calm and quiet! We drove straight to Rose's elementary school, about two miles from the kindergarten school, and arrived 25 minutes before school started. The drop-off procedure at this school was curbside only, but the foot traffic was regulated so only two kids could get out of their cars at a time. The real catch was that no kids could exit their cars until 9:00 am, ten minutes before the official school start time. So Rose and I sat there for 15 minutes, ho-humming and watching the waiting cars stack up behind us. We were so early that our car was near the front of the line, but by the time the first kids were allowed into the school, a long line of cars snaked through the parking lot, out onto the street, and all the way down to the stop light at the corner. Fifteen minutes is a long time to sit in a stationary vehicle. At last Rose was waved out of our car, and she joyfully entered school for the first time in 8 months.
The school drop-off routine takes me long total of 45 minutes. There is no way to streamline it any more than that. Due to the long line of waiting cars at Rose's school, arriving there later would still mean a long wait. Rose and I decided to listen to an audiobook together while we sit in the car for 15 minutes waiting. The girls loved their time at school! They were so happy and tired afterwards, especially Amber.
Two school days a week goes FAST, but we'll take what we can get!
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