Freaking Out About Kindergarten

Well, it's January here in the frozen tundra we call home (and no, I don't even live in New Brunswick or anything- it's just very freaking cold here)...so, of course, what is on my mind but - AUTUMN and BACK TO SCHOOL.

Lana will be starting kindergarten in the fall, and I have it on good authority that if she doesn't have a private school placement by March 1, she will not get one.

No, I do not live in Manhattan. Or Chicago. Or some chi-chi suburb of either one. I'm just a mid-western girl in a city on Lake Erie, and I did not expect this kind of PRESSURE.

It's not that I have anything against public-school. In fact, I'm married to a public school teacher who does a darn fine job educating the public (if I do say so myself.) I have many friends and relatives who are fabulous public school teachers. I support public education. And I am generally happy with the public school district in which we live.

Gabriel attends 2ND grade at the public school.

Need I go on to convince you that I am not anti-public-school?

I think not.

BUT....

You knew this was coming, right? The big BUT...

BUT, the school district we live in is one of only two school districts in our county that has half-day kindergarten.

Which is, frankly, kind of a pain-in-the-neck for a working mom. And not really what Lana, in my opinion, needs.

Since March of last year, Lana has been in a NAEYC-accredited all-day pre-school program located on the campus of a large university. They have done a phenomenal job with her - she has two awesome teachers in a positive, comfortable setting. Lana is happy there. She loves S~ and S~, her teachers, and she loves her school friends. Her ability to speak English as well as she does is really a testament, I think, to the school and her teachers. Bottom line, I love Lana's current school situation. Gabriel was in the same day-care/pre-school from the time he was a baby until he started first grade. Gabriel did his kindergarten year at the school and it was a great success.

The problem is, there may not be enough children this coming year for the school to have a kindergarten program. Which means I need a second choice.

I'm all freaked out about this. As near as I can tell, our options are as follows:

1. Hebrew School - although I'm left wondering if it's totally inappropriate for me to send my Vietnamese-American-previously-Buddhist-being-raised-Episcopalian daughter to Hebrew School, merely for the convenience of it having all day kindergarten.

2. Catholic School - there are two options for all day Catholic school kindergarten near our home. One of them has an extremely inconvenient start and end time, so, it's out. The other one would be okay, except that I have many deep, unresolved issues with the Catholic Church...like, just as an example, birth control. I'm all for it, they're not, and I cannot reconcile giving tuition money to them. Does that make me too rigid?

3. Montessori School - we have an excellent Montessori School option. It is quite expensive, but, I'm leaning in that direction.

4. Public School in the morning, some kind of after-school day-care program. Honestly, this would be the most convenient for me, but, I am not sure about the after-school program. She would be bussed to a different building from her kindergarten...I'm all in a tizzy about this. I'm not sure it's a good fit for Lana when she has been in one place getting consistent care and lessons from the same people all day, for her to have kindergarten with a brand-new teacher, followed by afternoon care with brand-new care givers...I think it is worth mentioning that this is the option that Lana would probably choose for herself, because she is desperate to go to the same school as her big brother...

Just not sure what to do,
Gretchen

Right now, as I type this, it is about 7:40 PM Eastern Time in the US on January 7th. But, in Vietnam, it's about 7:40 AM on January 8th.


Which is roughly the time that, one year ago, we left our hotel to travel to Lana's orphanage for the last time.


Lana left the orphanage with us, and two other families, in a taxi a few hours later. She had never been in a car before. At times it is hard for me to wrap my head around the enormous changes this little girl has been through in the last 365 days. She had never been in a car before.


She had never been outside the province of DaNang before. She had never seen snow. The list is endless...


If you've been reading our story for a while, you know this. If you haven't been reading...well, I blogged the whole thing here:

We Have Lan

and here


Giving and Receiving Ceremony

As I type this, Lana is sitting in the big bathtub in my bathroom, tormenting her brother with a fish-shaped water pistol.

A year ago, as I concentrated on getting through each second without flying apart into a gazillion pieces of emotional wreckage, I don't think I allowed myself to believe that such normalcy was attainable.

I'm not going to lie and say that every day of our lives is an exercise in normalcy. (And I'm not sure that I would want to be living that kind of life.)

I strive for honesty here in this bloggy place.

The truth is, this has not been an easy year.

The truth is, this year has been more difficult than I imagined it would be on the day that Lana became our daughter.

The truth is that Lana crawled into my lap two days ago, played with the buttons on my shirt, and matter of factly said, "I used to have a different mommy. You used to be not my mommy. I had another mommy. Now I have you. I love you, mommy. I love two mommies." (I am NOT paraphrasing. That is, word for word, what she said to me.)

The truth is that is I was so stunned by her statement that instead of forming a response, I blinked and I just said, "I love you, too, Lana."

The truth is that while watching her adoption video with me on New Year's Day, she pointed to the footage of the orphanage and said, "I was scared. I was scared in that place, Mommy. Scared." And my heart broke for her.

The truth is that she was up half the night after watching that video, screaming in her sleep, "I don't want to go, I don't want to go, I don't want to go."

I don't think you have to be Freud to draw some pretty hefty conclusions about that.

At the end of the day, at the end of a year, the truth is that I love this child. I didn't fall in love with her right away. I fell in love with her in bits and pieces. When I think about what our journey to this child means to me, and the family of four that we have become with her in it, there are two verses of a song that run through my head. And begging the pardon of the person or persons who wrote it, because I don't pretend to know what they were writing about, (and it is most certainly about a woman, because, come on, isn't that what all the best songs are about?) - the song is Pat Green's Wave On Wave- and to me the words sum up the way Lana brought us to find her, and then made us love her - wave on wave, piece by piece, over and over. The words go like this:

So caught up now in pretending
That what we're seeking is the truth
I'm just looking for a happy ending
All I'm looking for is you.

You came upon me, wave on wave.
You're the reason I'm still here.
Am I the one you were sent to save?
You came upon me, wave on wave.