Amazing News!

Enjoying our first snow in three months

(which is already gone a few days later)

I've droned on for years about the kids' schools and I've been researching them even longer, since we've lived here nearly a dozen years now.  It's hard to believe that they are starting all day kindergarten in just five short months.  We registered at our neighborhood school (a STEM academy) last month, and then had to apply to enter a lottery for our top choice open enrollment school.  It was seriously more nerve wracking that anything I've applied for myself.  I had to write essays, though it was supposedly a straight lottery, so it drove me crazy that I couldn't do anything to up our chances.  And given we had two who had to get winning numbers (or we'd have to decide to split/try again next year if only one did), and how low acceptance rates have been in recent years, it was even more unlikely.

By some random act of luck, we found out yesterday that they were both accepted.  Unbelievable.

Beyond being ranked in amazing company (I'm looking at you Chicago's Classicals and the suburbs' best), it is a smaller school (about half the size of our neighborhood school), all while being K-8 (bye bye middle school hell), super diverse, with mixed grade classes and a curricular focus on multiple intelligences.  It's starts/ends later than other schools, and they'll take the bus together since it's several miles away, but conveniently located otherwise.  It's basically like private school, without the bills. I will not miss having them in two different schools. 

We literally don't have to worry about where they are going to school again until high school in nine years.  We also love our neighborhood school, if for some reason it doesn't work out.  I wish I could say my work here is done, but of course it's all just the beginning.  And I wish I could claim some credit, but unlike conceiving, carrying, birthing, nursing, getting them to finally walk and talk and potty train (by force), there wasn't a damn thing I could do.  Craziness.  Now we may never move, since we'd have to stay in district anyway.

Work is keeping DH super busy, so he can't take off for a proper spring break. :(  Instead, I'm taking the kids up to visit family in sunny WI, as my step-father is still fighting his cancer valiantly (it has spread quickly and he's now doing a clinical trial as well as more chemo) and they love nothing more than their cousins.  Then I head to NYC for my solo spring break.  Can't wait!