Five Days!

Five days until the Great Summer Adventure of 2015 begins! Tinkerbelle wraps up school this week, then packs and flies out her next week...all very exciting!

I'm pretty fired up. I still recognize that this could end really badly in a lot of ways, but I'm just really looking forward to it. It will be great to have that much time with her, great for the girls to spend that much time with their "other" Aunt and, as I've mentioned, it sounds like it will be a really welcome break for both her and her Mom.

I don't actually have a ton of "plans" for the summer. She'll be working pretty much every weekday, and coming to the beach with us just about every weekend. She is going to inherit Munchkin's regular Thursday dinner date slot, which will ensure that I get a regular chance to sit down with her without any other distractions and talk about how everything is going. I have a couple of other things planned for her first week and a half here, too - a baseball game, an ice cream festival (more or less!) and a free concert - but I don't really anticipate having to keep her that busy.

I anticipate that she will make friends through work, and she will definitely have some time to be on her own and hang out...I'll probably give her a curfew, but I love the idea of her having some free time with kids her own age until then. At some point she is going to want to stay home for a weekend, which I probably won't sign off on, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it!

Other than that, we're just gonna play it by ear! The weather has finally warmed, Munchkin is back from Europe (probably for not the last time this summer) and settled in at the beach, and I am really excited for summer! The girls have their pre-school graduation next Friday, although they will stay where they are until the end of August before school starts. That makes me feel pretty old:-). They've loved their day care and so have I...I'll be a little sad to see them go.

Nothing major beyond that! Girls are getting big, work is work, The Boy is still my favorite:-). No news is good news, I guess!

Planning

Munchkin is out of the country for about a week and a half (friends in London, friends and the boy in Paris...ho hum) which meant that she was unavailable for our regular Thursday night date last night. Big Sis took that opportunity to schedule a meeting with Smoking Hot Roommate and I to begin planning what will be the single greatest party in the history of mankind: Munchkin's 21st birthday.

No, I am not kidding. We legitimately began the planning process last night. Her birthday is April 3, 2016.

There is absolutely no way that this ends up being anything short of preposterously out of hand.

Roar!

Big outing on Saturday...to the zoo to see the two new lions!

To back up, LK is absolutely obsessed with lions. And sharks, specifically because they eat other animals (don't ask...) Her favorite book is The Tawny Scrawny Lion, and she owns at least a half dozen stuffed lions of various sizes (and OMG...read the reviews for that book, they are hilarious. It's about talking animals who wear clothes, and these people are concerned because it is geographically implausible?)

Her favorite animal at the Franklin Park Zoo was always Christopher the lion, who commanded an exhibit at the center and highest point of the zoo. From there, he used to periodically stand atop his rock and roar loud enough for everyone to hear for a mile or two around the zoo...almost as if he had an internal alarm to remind everyone, every couple of hours, that he was in fact the lion. And you were not.

Christopher died in March...he was the oldest lion in North America and they had to put him to sleep because he had all sorts of old-lion maladies. I read about this in the Globe, but I never told her because I was kind of hoping that I didn't have to...she reacted fine when their favorite dog died two years ago, but I'd rather not explain that the lion went to heaven.

Wasn't I happy then, to hear that the zoo was getting TWO new male lions in early May! Not only do I not have to explain to her that the lion died, but the whole thing just got doubly good! Sadly, the lions are here because one of them killed his prospective mate in Dallas, and their interest in a breeding program led them to seek a new home for these lions and a new, hopefully less murderous, male lion to start their program. But, Boston had the facilities to take them and a gaping hole in their zoo landscape, Dallas had a need for a new home for their lions, and everything worked out for the best...

The lions made their debut on Friday, so we took the girls to see them on Saturday, and oh boy were they excited! From the time we got out of the car, LK was on a mission...she didn't want to see the baby gorilla, she didn't want to see the zebras or the giraffes or the flamingos. She stopped at the Ostrich for a minute, but mostly she was totally focused on seeing her two new friends! She spent no less than half an hour walking from one vantage point to another, looking at them, smiling, and holding up her stuffed animals for them to see. For their parts, the lions laid in the shade and periodically lifted their heads;-)

After that she was content to finally see the other animals, ride a camel, play at the playground and enjoy the day. All in all, a mighty successful trip to the zoo!

(Side note: the mother gorilla just gave birth to her third or fourth baby, which I am guessing is unusual for an animal in captivity. She is so comfortable with the zookeepers now that she allowed them to give her an ultrasound when she was pregnant...which I find pretty remarkable.)

Summer

Looks like Summer is pretty well planned at this point! Tinkerbelle (for the uninitiated - my much younger half sister, lives in Chicago, I never met her until she was 7 and I was 24) has secured herself a full-time job as a camp counselor, which means that she is coming to live with us when she gets out of school!

It all came together really quickly because she really dove into it. She called and emails a bunch of places from home, lined up three different meetings for last Friday afternoon, and came out here to go to those and then visit for a couple days. I picked her up at the airport at about 10:00, she had her interviews at 12:30, 2:30 and 4:00, and she got a call from her first choice at about 8:00 offering her the job!

She is going to be a camp counselor for kids ages 8-12, although the exact specifics will be determined later on. Most likely she will rotate between a couple of different facilities in the city, all of which are easily accessible from the T. She's going to be working from 7:30-3:30, Monday to Friday, making $9/hr...pretty awesome first job, if you ask me.

This will be a big deal for her. Living in a new place, away from her Mom, with a lot more freedom than she is used to. She's gonna have a boss and responsibilities and she is going to have to get herself to work on time and handle all of that by herself. I am not her Mom, and I'm not going to do that for her. But, I think she will do well with the extra leash, I think she will benefit from meeting a bunch of co-workers her own age, and she will certainly enjoy earning some money on her own (right now, it seems like a veritable fortune to her...it will seem less so when she finds out how taxes work:-)).

I think she will benefit from the break from home, too. She's not really a "troubled" kid in the normal sense, but she's had some social issues at school this year that have impacted her grades and her behavior. Kids at that age, especially girls, can be really tough...and she naturally kinda marches to the beat of her own drummer, so I think that leads to some tension with other kids. The good news is that two months is a lifetime when you are 15, so simply going away for a while might create something of a reset. I hope, at least.

It will diminish my own ability to take too many three day weekends at the beach, but that's ok...I can manage for one summer:-). I'll gladly trade that for some uninterrupted sister time!

In other sister news - there is a new tattoo in the works. I'll give you the details some other time when we finalize it:-)

Making Plans

It looks like we have school figured out for the girls, and not surprisingly they are going to go to the same school that Munchkin went to. While that means a lot of years of a lot of tuition bills, it made the most sense and it is a place that I know we'll be comfortable with and the girls will do great.

As I mentioned, the public schools in Boston are terrible, and they are not neighborhood schools...you don't go to a school based on where you live. Incoming students fill out a preference form and then get assigned based on requests, a lottery and very squishy rules around "fairness". Most kids get one of their there top choices, but many do not, and many end up with really, really inconvenient assignments.

There were two elementary schools that we would have considered sending the girls to. One is in the South End (pretty much right on the other side of Boston Common from us) that is one of the very few truly excellent elementary schools in the city and would be pretty convenient for us, and one in the North End (pretty much right across Government Center/Fanueil Hall from us) that is also quite good but would be less convenient.

The good news is that they got assigned to the one in the North End. In that sense we were really lucky...those are both highly demanded schools, and the girls were really fortunate to get into one of them. Being twins helps, since they always keeps siblings together, so they both essentially get whichever lottery number is lowest among the two of them.

Now, the bad news. The quality of individual public city schools is very fluid. Because of the way the students get assigned, there are very few of the inherent advantages that tend to make schools good year over year (read: consistently committed parents). The North End is relatively insulated because the universe of people who want to go there every day is kind of limited, but there is really no way to be sure that the school will remain a high-achiever for the next 8, 10 or 12 years. It is a naturally transient population, even among families, and that worries me. I guess it wouldn't be the biggest deal to have to pull them out in a couple of years if the circumstances change, but I'd rather not go through with it.

Also, anyone who has ever been to Boston's North End will quickly remember how difficult it is to get anywhere with any regularity. While the school is just about one mile from our condo, it is a VERY LONG mile. There's a bunch of one-way streets and an awful lot of traffic. It's too long for the girls to walk, at least for a couple years, but there is no easy way to drive there. On a good morning, it is a 15 minute drive. My guess is that there were days this winter that it took nearly an hour and a half. On any morning, it's highly unpredictable, which means allotting at least a half hour for the trip to school and spending a lot of time waiting because we are there early. But still being late some days. In short, it makes just getting to school every day a huge frustration.

So, in the end, we are going to send them to private school, which I am not totally thrilled about and which will cost a whole bunch of money. But, I know the school, I know the teachers and the staff and I am very comfortable with them. Plus, I get to go back to walking to school on my way to work:-)