A brief update, and then a thought.
We are packed, at least, mostly packed. Lucky that R is off in Arizona (and she could give us a call tonight, please) so there's space to stack all of K's stuff for school in R's room. It's piled pretty high, which means it's almost done. And to make matters even more amazing (although what's more amazing than a kid packed for college three days early?), we had the best time doing it.
I did the laundry (of course), making trips up and down the dreaded basement stairs. We pushed furniture in the family room aside, spread out a blanket on the floor picnic style, and then K laid out stacks of t-shirts, jeans, and so on, neatly, and over the course of a few hours, packed them into these plastic cube things from (where else) The Container Store.
While we watched movies. How cool was this? Here I am with the kid, both of us working (I also updated her computer while this was going on), and we watched Sense and Sensiblity and then Shakespeare in Love.
Kids. It doesn't get better than this. I mean, really. An adult daughter who bonds with you over Jane Austen and Shakespeare. It was worth the 19+ year wait.
From The Daily Zen, August 07
I live in central Florida, and the public schools begin next Monday, on 8/11! ....When do the schools start back up in your area? Do you think it should be earlier/later?
Let me just say this: when you are a teacher, there's a kind of never-grown-up feeling. The year begins in the fall and ends in the spring. The summer is bonus time, not really part of the actual year. Just like when you were a kid, and the school year defined the real year; it still does when you're a teacher. We tend to forget that the real year in the real world in January to December, twelve months long instead of ten. I guess as long as you have kids in your house, you still get some of this; it's hard for me to say since I've never known anything else. All my life, I've been a student or a teacher or both.
When does the school year begin? In northern New Jersey and its environs (we're very close to the New York suburbs, like Rockland and Westchester Counties), we start right after Labor Day. Once in my life we started earlier, because Labor Day was very late and otherwise we would have finished the school year in July, which is verboten. But we start after Labor Day.
It has always been this way. Why? I used to think of it as a relic from our farming past: children were needed at home all summer to help with the planting. But that doesn't make sense. They would be needed at home in the fall, too, to help with the harvest. I know there are rural places -- a place in Maine I know of -- where large groups of kids are excused from school in the fall to harvest potatoes (in Maine) and other things elsewhere, I suppose. I always thought we started school late because of farming, but now I'm not so sure.
The place I live is old. Not only was it settled in the 1640s -- lots of places in the country have old settlements, including the Southwest -- we turned into suburbs early on. The cities I live near are old, New York, for one, and Paterson, which was founded by Alexander Hamilton. The move out to the suburbs hit big here before and after World War II. All the schools in my town were built between 1921 and 1959. Not a building newer than that. I'm guessing that it's pretty much the same all around where I live, northern New Jersey, suburban New York, and southern Connecticut, what we here know as the Tri-State Area.
Come June, it's hot. It's real hot. It's so hot. And there's not a school in town with air-conditioning, except in rooms here and there.
The older the school, the less air-conditioning it's got. So we get a trade-off: we come to school all winter, slogging though the snow, because even though the heating oil's expensive, we've got the equipment to burn it into heat. Come the hot, we've got to be out of there.
I wonder what it's like to just keep on going, on through the summer months. What would the kids be like? When would we make the transition from year to year? That's assuming we could continue to breathe and live in there, like they do in new schools, like they do in parts of the country where the communities and schools are newer and are air-conditioned.
Labor Day -- the day after Labor Day -- works for me. I still have trouble dealing with the colleges that start before that, and sending my kids off then. Starting school in mid-August would be so weird and different for me.
By the way, we generally finish the school year the week of June 21. A little late, perhaps, for those of you unhappy with your early start? Ah, everything in life's a trade-off, isn't it.
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I'm watching The Simpsons
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