I don't have much to talk about today. As you know, I usually write these things the night before. Well, most of today has been spent "studying" for the DCPS Preschool Lottery. My head hurts from the stress. There's a funny thing about living on my side of town. Apparently, everyone is doing so well over here that they see no need to have a preschool program at any of the public schools in my area. I've been checking some of the parenting boards and I see conversations like, "We're considering taking our child out of (Expensive Day Care #234) and putting her in (Expensive Private School #452)."
Meanwhile in Poverty's Paradise, I'm thinking..."Hmm, if I drink nothing but water for the next two months will I clean my kidney up enough to sell on the black market so that my daughter can go to daycare for a year?" She has to go to school next year! It's not even about me at this point. There's a scene in The Jacksons: An American Dream, where Michael (and those four other guys) want to play basketball or something and Joe beats the hell out of them with a sledgehammer or a staple gun or something (I might have that part wrong). Anyway, the writers go out of their way to highlight that Michael didn't have a childhood.
Well that's how I feel whenever my daughter and I walk past a school. She sees the kids on the playground and goes running towards them. At first I thought it was just her wanting to play, but she does the same thing when she sees a group of kids on a field trip at the zoo. We were walking to the grocery store one day and ran into the little rope-line of kids from the daycare out on their morning walk. The way she started yelling and fighting to get in line with them, you would've thought I was kidnapping her.
The point is that she wants to be with her own kind. I'm starting to feel like Balou from The Jungle Book. (Wait til you have kids...you'll start speaking in Disney references too.) I joke about her trying to kill me...Okay those aren't really jokes. I recount the horrifying truths of my life in a humorous slant. Anyway, I love my little girl and it sucks when you finally realize that being with you 24/7 is no longer the best thing for her.
I've been spending my free time studying like a QB before the game. I'm reading PDF files of lottery placement results for the last few years and it appears that most of the schools that I want her to go to usually fill up with in-boundary kids or kids with siblings already in the school. So then I start looking at my backup schools and I go all Magellan with it. I'm printing out Google Maps and breaking out the protractor and abacus. I'm trying to calculate how long, how much and how difficult it would be to get to some of these places on the Metro or by driving.
I'm studying traffic patterns, rush hour schedules, bottlenecks, etc. How much is before and aftercare? If/When Metro breaks down, can the wife get to point A before I can? If two trains leave Metro Center at the same time and one is traveling North at a speed of X...when the A/C conks out and "a situation on the platform" prevents the train from moving for 35 minutes, can the other parent pick our child up?
I gotta tell you...it's not looking good right now. But I'm super dad. I gotta make this happen. So, enough typing in the blog. It's time to get back to work.
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