Lovely to touch base with some of you that I have lost contact with (Hi Ally, Hi Nilsa!)...and you're already giving me more blog ideas! That means two posts in one week...watch out for other signs of the apocalypse...
On Monday, I noted that the girls start school in the fall, and that we hadn't yet ironed out
the details, but that it will almost certainly mean private school..."I'd rather not spend that kind of money on elementary school, but
that's the price of urban living, I guess."
Nilsa, who's son is just a little younger than the girls, responded because she faces an almost identical circumstance: "I HATE THAT! It's the exact
same way in Chicago. The public school system is a mess. ... It's exactly why
we WILL vacate the city next year. We will not pay property taxes for a
school system we do not use."
First of all, I can confirm, firsthand, her impressions of the Chicago Public Schools;-). If it's data you want, Zillow offers rankings of schools as a part of its data set, and of the 127 public High Schools in their database in Chicago, 37 of them are currently rated 1 on a scale of 1 to 10. Yes, you read that right...1/3 of the public high schools have the lowest possible rating!!! (BTW...I graduated from one of them...Class of '01 Whoop!). The results in Boston are pretty similar...22 public high schools have ratings, and six of them are 1's. Making the story even worse...the only schools that have scores above 3 are admission schools - public schools, but kids have to test into them.
The basic message being clear: we pay a lot of money for our schools (Boston spend over $20,000 per pupil, an extraordinarily high figure) and those schools are terrible. So terrible, in fact, that concerned parents of school-aged children, people like Nilsa and her husband, tend to flee the city if they can find any way to do so. They flee for the near suburbs which, in Boston at least, boast some of the country's best public schools. Boston compounds its problems by eschewing local schools in favor of an absurd busing system that shuttles kids all over the city, destroys the sense of community and has the net effect of making ALL of the schools as bad as the worst local school would be.
{This is a super long story, and it's more complicated than that...there have been some efforts made recently to roll back the busing, especially at the elementary level, and as a result the elementary schools in middle and upper-middle class places like Roslindale and West Roxbury have improved, but the damage done by busing was catastrophic and likely permanent.}
But we're not moving, and never actually even considered it. And yes, I know that we're crazy and will end up spending somewhere well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars to send the kids to school, but I just can't bring myself to move to the burbs. I'd be miserable! The Boy is much the same way, too. He grew up in one of those leafy suburbs, so he is more equipped to handle it than I am, but he's still not the least bit interested in moving. Of note, his Twin Sister is much the same, but his two older siblings live in suburban New York.
You know what else? I want to have hip city kids:-) I want kids that grow up around the sights and sounds and smells of an urban environment. I don't want to put on my social justice warrior hat, but I'd rather my kids be around people who look and talk and think differently than they do. [I'd also like to fully note the obvious inconsistencies in my theory...just go with it]. I don't want them to go to school and play sports and take dance classes and do all of their other extracurricular activities with the same 250 kids from ages 5-18.
I may also be spoiled by my first foray in urban parenting, which has resulted in one of the coolest people on the planet, and one who would absolutely not be who she is if she had grown up anywhere else. She's bold and confident and adventurous and she makes friends fast and she's incredibly nice without being a pushover and she is all sorts of awesome in a way that I think is heavily influenced by where she grew up.
That then, is how we came to where we are. It's a drag to pay a whole bunch of money for something that we are already paying for via property tax, but it's something we're willing to do in exchange for all of the benefits that come with living where we do.
Wednesday, March 18, 2015
School Days
Monday, March 16, 2015
Oh, hey...
I haven't blogged in...well, about a year. And even that was a "I'm still alive" post, so I haven't actually really blogged in much longer than that. Frankly, I can't tell you why I am blogging now or whether or not I will write anything tomorrow or ever again, but for some reason I just feel like blogging. OK, true story, I was suddenly driven to want to comment on two different blogs, and realized that it would be really awkward to do so after having been silent for a full year!
That probably implies that I really, really have something to say...which, alas, would be false. I suppose that's good, since most people would come back like this only if they had some traumatic life experience. In that sense, I guess I am happy that nothing bad has happened:-)
Let's see, then...the girls will be five next month. FIVE! They start Kindergarten in the fall, although their school remains TBD, since we haven't figured that out yet. There is a chance they will go to public school if they get assigned to one that we like (don't even ask about the City's school assignment process...fucking ridiculous), but most likely they will be in private school. I'd rather not spend that kind of money on elementary school, but that's the price of urban living, I guess.
Speaking of that, we haven't moved and probably won't any time soon. The good news is that it's been a good couple of years for the real estate market and our condo is worth an awful lot. The bad news is that anything we would like to buy is also worth an awful lot. An awful lot more...so, we'll probably stay put for another year or two and then just suck it up and write a really, really, really big check to get something bigger. Lord help us...
The Boy is awesome. As always:-)
Munchkin will be, gulp, twenty in two weeks! Don't even ask how we got to that point, I am already feeling old enough as it is. She is currently in the Turks and Caicos for spring break. I am currently in a raging fit of jealously. There is no boyfriend, although there are always boys...and there is still always Frenchie. They're not "together", but to hell if I could explain it. They're definitely not "not together", either...
Smoking Hot Roommate is the proud Mama of an adorable baby boy, born just before Thanksgiving. And, like everything else, she is totally rocking motherhood and making noise about having another one in a little bit:-). Big Sis still has the two and no more in the works. They and both of their spouses are happy and healthy.
I'll spare you any massive political diatribes this soon after my lengthy hiatus (other than, can we all please just calm down? Not everything anyone says is The. Worst. Thing. Ever. Washington has become a contest to accuse people of treason as often as possible...) I will also spare you complaints about the snow, which you certainly would have heard if I had been blogging regularly because, holy hell, did it snow a lot!!!
And...um...the Patriots won the Super Bowl, so that was a thing. I've become obsessed with Alaska-based reality television, so that's a thing, too. And, um, I'm not any taller. :-D
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Oh yeah, hey there!
An email from a longtime reader last week reminded me that I have basically stopped blogging. The gist of the email was "Are you OK? You don't need any kind of help, do you?!" Obviously, I have the sweetest readers, right? But also...yea, I am a terrible blogger. And I have nothing profound to tell you today, but I will basically copy and paste the email I sent to her (minus the real names!) as a very brief update.
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I know, I have become a non-blogger! I didn't do that
on purpose, I just kinda ran out of things I felt like writing. I
haven't ruled out starting again, but I have clearly lost my mojo.
Everything is just fine! The girls turned four in April and
keep us generally busy and usually pretty tired:-). Munchkin just
finished her Freshman year and is busy being utterly fabulous...she was
in New York last weekend, at the beach through this weekend, then off
to London for a few days and then Paris for about a week. Then back to
the beach, and likely to Nice later this summer. It's a tough life!
And Smoking Hot Roommate is pregnant! {some additional color deleted}
Other than that, we're just getting ready for summer. {more deleted}. The Boy and his siblings convinced his Dad to sell the house
(they are from about 20 miles from Boston) and move closer to
us and Twin Sister. That should be wrapped up in about a month, which will be
really nice. And The Boy's older sister is very unexpectedly and hilariously
not intentionally pregnant, too:-)
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So, there is my very sad recap of the lat three months or so. Maybe, just maybe, this will prompt me to blog more than once a quarter, huh?
Tuesday, March 04, 2014
Deteriorating at a rapid pace
Last Wednesday evening, I managed to acquire a short-term stomach virus. The good news is that it came and went in about 16 hours. The bad news is that those 16 hours were incredibly unpleasant...it was not very sexy.
But, I rallied, and felt better on Friday, and was back to 100% on Saturday.
Right up until I decided that it would be a good idea to chase the girls in circles around the dining room table. I remember thinking "This is probably not a good idea. One of them is going to run into the china cabinet." Approximately 41 seconds later, I kicked said china cabinet, breaking the little toe on my left foot.
I'm sure I have some readers who have broken toes before, but for those who haven't...it is not really that much fun. It doesn't really hurt, per se, but it takes me forever to walk anywhere, and the color is really downright grotesque. I will spare you the pictures...but it looks kinda like it is about to be lost to frostbite!
Clearly, I am not aging well...
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Winter, et al
Hey, check it out, it's that girl that used to blog!!! Sadly, this is {hides head in shame} my first blog post this year. And I would like to pretend that I had a really, really good reason for that, but the truth is that I just never really felt like blogging at any moment between then and now when I was near a computer.
"Hey, that's why they invented Twitter, you twerp!" shout the readers.
"Shut it!" says the blogger.
Anyway, we remain firmly in the grasp of a very cold winter. You would probably assume, given the constant coverage of the polar vortex, the incredibly cold temperatures throughout the midwest and the almost Biblically cold and icy weather in the South, that we got an incredibly cold winter. You would, however, sort of be wrong. Not that it hasn't been cold - it has - but it just hasn't been that much colder than normal. There was a day in January when the high temperature in Chicago was about 4 below, the high in Atlanta was 16 and the high here was about 17.
Not that 17 isn't cold...but it's not really newsworthy around here like those other places were. I feel like we had one or two days where it never got about 10, which is not really that abnormal. So, I don't want to say that we got spared the wrath of the cold that has blanketed the rest of the country, but relatively we got off a little bit easy.
Enough about the weather, though...
The girls are not really loving winter: it is often a chore to convince them that they should go outside on weekend days. They like playing in the snow, for a couple of minutes, but given the choice on a normal, cold Saturday, they would rather play inside all day. That usually seems like an acceptable idea until approximately nap time, when they get antsy and tired all at the same time, but not tired enough to take a nap and therefore just really kind of unmanageable... Which leads to some bribery "You can have hot cocoa when we come back if we go for a walk first," seems to work in most situations.
They will, gasp, be four in two months. Yikes. They start kindergarten a year from September! They are just such little people now...they can pick out their clothes and dress themselves and tell me what they want for dinner, or for lunch the next day, and tell jokes and stories and stuff. They have substantially different personalities, which is sort of neat, and they have really different like and dislikes (if you see then, MA is the one wearing pink...at all times...and LK is the one wearing blue or grey.)
And Munchkin continues to just basically be awesome at life. She and Frenchie are still "not together", although they clearly sort of are. She spent a week in Paris over his winter break, most of it with him (although she also visited her roommate). I dunno, it makes sense to her, and she seems cool with it. There are also some other boys, but nothing terribly serious. We still have dinner every Thursday, although we have branched out and don't always eat chicken fingers in the same place anymore.
We are also headed to Tortolla tomorrow for a very long weekend. Girls only! Kind of a last minute trip that can be categorized as a "mental health refresher". Smoking Hot Roommate, Big Sis, a cousin of theirs, Munchkin and I are going and the entire agenda is to sit around and enjoy the sun. Obviously, given my complaining up top about the weather, I am pretty darn excited for this. The Boy gets the girls all to himself, and he also gets absolved of having to buy me something for Valentine's Day. Maybe not a totally fair trade, but don't tell me I am not thoughtful:-).
Other than that, I have nothing super important to tell you, other than my current case of acute Olympic fever:-)