Timing

Alex has a cold or something. I guess. It doesn't really seem to manifest most of the time, but for the last three or four mornings, he's woken up at 4:30 sharp, coughed for ten minutes or so, and then gone back to sleep for half an hour or an hour. He usually wakes back up cheerful and happy, though this morning he woke up wailing and couldn't be consoled until I got him downstairs.

(When he is weaned, I am so spending a morning in bed. Going back to bed for a nap after being up for two or three hours just doesn't have the same effect as being able to elbow your spouse, say, "It's your turn," and then roll over and go back to sleep. I adore my children, I really do, but some mornings I would kill to be able to sleep until six.)

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Matt took Penny yesterday to get her registered for kindergarten. He assembled all the assorted paperwork that they'd told me we'd need (birth certificate and social security card, physical record from the doctor's office including updated vaccinations, not one but two proofs of residency), collected Penny from daycare, and took her to the school.

Where he was promptly handed a half-inch-thick stack of forms. "Will you be filling those out here, or coming back with them later?"

"...Later, I guess."

Among the forms was a Computer Use Policy that Penny had to sign. They start 'em young, these days, getting used to skimming past incomprehensible legal and/or technical babble and scrawling your name at the end with the vaguely uneasy hope that whoever gave it to you knows what they're doing. (What would they have done, I wonder, if she hadn't learned how to write her name yet? As it was, apparently it gave Penny a thrill to write her name in tiny letters, and this morning she was practicing to see how small she could get it. She fit one rendition in the white space of the UPC code on one of her comic books.)

Eventually, Matt finished filling out the forms ("...and as I've written four hundred and ninety-two times, now, the mother's daytime phone number is...") and took her back up to the school to turn them all in. He didn't say if they let her look around or anything, and they probably didn't have much time to tour, anyway, since it was getting on toward the time they needed to go pick Alex up from daycare. (Penny did find two things in the parking lot that filled her with excitement: a feather as long as my forearm, and a painted pawprint for the school mascot. So that's a positive start.)

Now we have nothing of importance to do about school until August, when we have two sessions to attend -- a skills assessment session so they know where to place her, and a meet-and-greet with the kindergarten teachers. Both of these, naturally, are placed awkwardly in the early/mid morning, so as to maximize the amount of vacation time they'll burn.

There will be a meeting probably immediately before school starts with the nurse and whichever teacher she gets so we can review the whole diabetes thing with them, but that isn't scheduled yet.

And that's it. Though probably sometime after her birthday, Penny will get her indoctrination to the back-to-school shopping experience, which is something that filled me with glee straight through college.