so far so good

Well, the kindergarten visit/orientation thing went pretty smoothly. Despite saying she was "excited but a little bit nervous", I saw mostly the former and hardly any of the latter. She was happy to be there, excited to find her desk, really jazzed about her locker, enjoyed touring around the room and the school, and seemed pretty comfortable.

I'm sure it will be a bit different next week when I'm not there and she has to stay longer than an hour, but I'm starting to think (wishfully?) that this might NOT be a repeat of the Montessori catastrophe (think R. M. S. Titanic, only with preschoolers and Montessori fundamentalist jihads). Jon will be going with us to drop her off on Monday, then from that point the idea is he will do dropoff and I will do pickup every day. I think that might be a good thing -- she gets his undivided attention for a brief time, he gets to see her school on a more or less daily basis (and precedent for this was set after Max was born and he took her to preschool, too).

One of my high-risk OBs has a daughter in the class. I've actually seen her and her little brother around all over the place this summer, with their nanny -- they go to the mall playground a lot and the Y. So we may get to know them, a bit.

Then Lisa and I met up at the bookstore and went on to the mall with the kids. Ava has the same effect on Emily that Aidan does -- they seem to bring out Emily's inner hyperactive demon two-year-old. At one point we were trying to get pizza for lunch and it was so chaotic and horrible that Lisa and I just started laughing hysterically and could not stop. Needless to say, we also saw people from Lisa's church and Emily's preschool while we were making utter crazed fools of ourselves.

It was about 400 degrees and 9,000% humidity outside today, which didn't help. EVERYONE seemed in a pissy mood, and all the kids were straight-up brats. I am really, really, really looking forward to fall.

Dinner: an improvised chicken breast thing with the thai orange bbq sauce from American Spoon, and a package of coconut jasmine rice from Target, of all places. We should do a veggie, but I'll just throw some frozen peas into the rice and call it a day.