school update.

for those of you following along at home (and for my mental clarity), we are in the fourth week at the kids' new school.

i am mostly tired of thinking about it and talking about it and lamenting it. i want it to be an easy, obvious situation, but it's not.

with emme: she is actually doing really well. her confidence level is vastly improved over what it was in cardinals at her old school. she is kinda/sorta making friends. the class size is small (8 or 10 kids), which is working really nicely for her. her teacher is sweet and nurturing and loving. i don't love that they watch tv 10-20 minutes a day, or that they eat refined sugar and have pizza days every week or so, or that they color in disney coloring books, or that they use sippy cups. but i love that they take pictures and send them to parents and that emme is mostly excited/glad to go to school and that she is engaged and pleased with what she's doing there. she is also learning some academic stuff (planets, parts of plants, that kind of thing), which is fun but maybe not quite as important to me as, say, grace and courtesy. but, if i had to stack rank it, i would say she's thriving here in a way she wasn't necessarily doing at the old school.

with hollis: different story. they tell me (every day) that he stops crying after i leave and does great for the rest of the day. but, he gets upset just seeing the building as we pull into the parking lot. he definitely cried during drop off at our last school, but it was mostly crying because i was leaving, whereas this feels like crying because we're there, ya know? i've picked up on a couple of different days where the little toddlers were eating Flav-R-Ice on the playground. there is a tv in his classroom. the books and work on the shelves are in opaque bins - not really accessible by curious kidlets. they change his diaper once or twice in the whole day. and his teacher is just not nurturing at all. she took him from my arms yesterday by holding him by the forearms and moving his body to the floor. i know they're not hurting him or doing anything wrong at ALL, it's just not the environment i want for him. it feels like a baseline of care rather than something wonderful.

i'm still second-guessing myself and wondering if i'm just crazy, especially since i've talked to numerous other parents whose kids go there/have gone there and there has been unanimous support and affection for the school. so i know it's not like it's really terrible. it's just also not what i thought it was. but i still don't feel like we have any great alternatives readily available, and i am not really sure what to do.