We have a winner!

And it's School #1! We're in, and the deposit check is in the mail. We think this is the absolute best place for Melrose right now, and logistically, it will make things way saner for her parents. We're not going to tell her until late in the summer, but we are so excited that it's hard to keep it quiet.

I'm already wondering which parents' committee to sign up for and wishing the new school year wasn't 8 months away. I am such a nerd, I've even read the parents' handbook online! My mom was always very involved in my school when I was growing up, and working FT or not, it's always been my dream to be a parent volunteer too. Though I don't think I'll be cramming eight kids into the back of the Chevy station wagon for a field trip to the nature center across town. Those were the days. Maybe I'll help run the book fair instead.

School #2 is still there, and at some point down the road, we'll probably revisit it. There are too many unknowns with it right now, the distance is a problem, and we'd just as soon wait until they're more settled in at the new location. For now, I'm just relieved that this whole process is over and we can move on.

Drive to the next pit stop

I simply cannot believe I've spent my life driving through Worcester, MA multiple times a year, and never knew I could have been stopping to see this. Talk about visiting Mrs. Murphy! Thanks to my Bostonian correspondents for the HEADs-up....

Crosseyed and painless

It's been very interesting for me to read about Anna Nicole Smith's daughter Dannielynn being diagnosed with strabismus. I'd actually been wondering about that, because in literally every photo I saw of her, her eyes didn't look right. I was really hoping that despite all the turmoil over her mother's troubled life and death and her paternity testing and so on, that someone would take a good look at this little girl and make sure she didn't have one more thing in her life to be self-conscious about. I commend her father for getting her the professional medical attention she needs, and for making clear that this in all likelihood is genetic and has nothing to do with her mom's drug use, etc. Strabismus is a fairly common condition, but it gets zero media attention. While I'm sorry Dannielynn has to go through this, I'm glad her family has taken the opportunity to educate the masses about her condition.

I was born with strabismus. My daughter developed it around 14 months. My mom recently discovered old photos of her great-grandfather and it looks like he had it too, although in the 1870s, there wasn't anything you could do about it. I've had 3 surgeries to realign my eyes, and Melrose just had her second. The technology for operating on eyes has improved vastly since my last surgery in 1992--while it used to mean a few nights in the hospital, nowadays it's an outpatient procedure. Even in the old days, the most traumatic thing about it was the anesthesia. People cringe when they hear about eye surgery, but I can assure Larry Birkhead and anyone else wondering that it's not painful. There's some discomfort the first couple of days, and you don't look too appetizing, but eyes heal quickly. Getting over the anesthesia is way worse than the trauma to your eye.

My hope for Melrose and Dannielynn is that they can gain some binocularity, or that at the very least their eyes can be aligned well enough to look straight and "pass" for normal. While there are much worse medical conditions out there than being crosseyed or walleyed, socially it can be very stigmatizing. You never look good in photos and you worry endlessly that people will notice your eyes are going two different ways. And athletically, you can pretty much forget being good at any sport involving flying objects. You can probably hit the baseball, but catching one is tricky. I didn't realize my depth perception was off until I was 16 and taking my driver's test, but you do learn to compensate in situations like driving. Melrose's doctor reiterated that she may never become a surgeon, a pro soccer player, or a military pilot, but it won't stop her from anything else. As a kid, I was always sort of annoyed that I couldn't see 3-D images or play tennis, but being called "Crosseyed Katie" caused way more grief than the few things I couldn't do.

When Melrose was diagnosed and we had to get her glasses due to overall farsightedness, I felt guilty and angry, even though I'd been a very conscientious pregnant mom. I didn't want my child to look funny or different from everyone else, or have to go through all the extra aggravation of patching and doctors' visits and surgery. Getting a 16-month-old to wear glasses full-time was a long and expensive battle. At the same time, there are so many worse things she could have. I'll take a couple of surgeries and distorted depth perception over daily insulin shots, or life-threatening allergies, or a progressive and fatal disease. I just want people to understand that strabismus doesn't make you blind or stupid; you just see the world a little differently than most people. And there are a few odd advantages...I will say that needing to buy contacts for only one eye is a huge bonus!

On a lighter note, we watched The Amazing Race finale last night. It wasn't very exciting, mostly because, like this person, I would have been happy with pretty much any of the winners. The grandpa-grandson team was my favorite from the beginning; the Type A dad-daughter team really grew on me; and the winning team didn't annoy me too much other than their persistent nutty-crunchy aura. There wasn't anyone I was really worried would win, since whiny Nate and Jen got eliminated last week. All in all, a decent season.

Well, duh!

Experts have finally determined that the model for da Vinci's Mona Lisa is the same person everyone always thought it was.

Maybe I'm amazed

Still no word on the school situation. We drove by both schools this weekend and wondered some more.

This fall has been kind of a midlife crisis for me, in a way. I've been so frustrated with work and my life in general, and worrying that I'm in an unhealthy place, and questioning many of my past decisions and wondering how or if I can reverse some of them, regain opportunities I passed up on, take chances I never took. I've taken steps towards doing things I've been thinking about doing for a long time, and resolving certain loose ends. I've also been looking long and hard at better ways to take care of myself, since doing so would undoubtedly make me nicer to be around. I haven't had much patience, or been very nice to have around this past fall. I love to read and write and create and spend quiet time thinking and take long walks, and my current lifestyle leaves me with little time or space to do much beyond keep up with the daily newspaper, write a blog post or take a few needlepoint stitches here and there, and hop on the elliptical machine for maybe a half-hour if I have the energy after I've gotten home and wrangled both kids into bed. I want to learn to use my sewing machine and make some stuff for the house. I want to get in really good shape and lose 40 pounds and run a 5-miler. I want to go through our CD collection and clean up all the smudges and scan my favorite stuff onto my iPod. I want to purge my closet and organize my attic. I want to write real letters to my friends and reconnect with people I haven't talked to in years. With a more predictable schedule and more energy, I could probably do these things.

I find myself wondering a lot lately whether my frustration comes because my expectations are too high. Is it realistic for a parent who has two little kids, no household help, a full-time job involving frequent travel, and a husband who travels a lot for his job, to have time to learn/apply new skills or the energy to read more than a few pages of a novel before passing out? To have the motivation to spend an hour working out instead of reading or catching up on e-mail? Will carving out time and energy to spend on myself become easier or harder as my kids get older? I know their needs will change, but will the amount of time required to meet them?

People I love often say to me that they don't know how I do everything I do. I honestly don't know either, because I don't feel like I'm doing all that much, and I often question my sanity in even trying. I feel like the man behind the curtain a lot of the time, doing just enough on the home and work fronts that people think I'm keeping up and stay off my back. And I don't feel like I'm accomplishing much that is noteworthy. Certainly, raising healthy kids and doing a halfway decent job at work at the same time is an achievement, but I don't see people failing at that. People do it every day and probably better than I do. I don't see it as anything remarkable.

Here is what I wonder about: I think about people who have to take truly difficult, dangerous, or demeaning jobs, or travel far from their loved ones, in order to support a family. I think about people who have had to give up their beloved careers to care for a relative with health issues, and do it with grace and dignity. How do they do it? I think about people who have achieved something incredible professionally and have done it with even more kids at home, with little money and big dreams of success (like J.K. Rowling), or with significant physical challenges (like Laura Hillenbrand, or Stephen Hawking). I think about people like Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote life-changing books (on scraps of paper with a quill pen in poor lighting) while raising five kids, running a labor-intensive nineteenth-century household, and being a pastor's wife. How on earth did she do it?

Or this guy? He was a train conductor, a performer, an artist who was part of Baltimore's painted-screen fame, and he only had half a body....

My old school

Sorry for no posts again lately. Home, kids, holidays, guests, and various other things have been taking over my free time entirely of late. And work has been, well, interesting. It appears that a promotion/position change that I've been pushing for over the last 5 months may finally be in the works, meaning perhaps that I've finally triumphed over a lot of interdepartmental BS. But it hasn't happened yet, so I will say no more, lest I jinx things.

Also, I've been alluding to some major life decisions of late. Chief among them is where to send our kids to school in the future, and if we choose to go the independent school route (I recognize fully that we are fortunate to be in a position to choose, and am humbly grateful for that), whether I'm willing to make certain sacrifices in my parental, personal and career aspirations to pay for that, or to accommodate the additional logistics that may be involved. Even though Melrose just turned 4 and we'd be happy to her to continue at her current school thru pre-K, the two independent schools we are considering are competitive. We decided she will probably have the best odds if we apply now, rather than waiting until kindergarten or later, when there are far fewer slots up for grabs and the admission requirements get more challenging.

Independent school feels a little weird to me. I worry about the ivory tower and the homogeneity (and the BILLS ) and so on, but going to public school is not an automatic reality check. I was a public-school kid, all the way through, but I can be the first to tell you it was nearly all white, nearly all wealthy, and that upper-middle-class teenagers at any school are inherently solipsistic and need some extra effort to see that not everyone in our world looks like them or has what they do.

I was fortunate to grow up in a small town with neighborhood schools and a superior education system. Still, in a town of wealthy, athletic, overachieving superstars, quieter kids like me tended to fly under the radar. I did great by most people's standards--lots of minor roles in various extracurriculars, a couple of honors classes each year, got into my first choice college. But I certainly could have been pushed harder, and I definitely could have achieved so much more, had there been a little more individual attention, and had I not endured a four-year period of general exclusion, bullying and sexual harassment with little support or intervention from the school administration. Back in the late 80s, nobody ever dreamed that a kid treated like I was would come to school with a rifle and open fire, or that parents would sue the school and other students for sexual harassment. My parents' complaints often had few positive results, or only awkward attempts to correct matters (like my guidance counselor facilitating a meeting with me and one of my worst tormentors, so this trashy blue-eyeshadowed little 7th grade b---h could explain to me exactly what I was doing that had made me a target). I'm sure most post-Columbine schools would do a better job than mine did, but I swore to myself that if I ever had a child who was a little...different, I would do everything in my power to keep him or her from experiencing that kind of trauma. Not that private school kids don't suffer social rejection and anguish, but as a tuition-paying parent, you have a lot more recourse than a taxpaying parent to make sure wrongs are righted.

Chip went to a wonderful private school, and his parents sacrificed a lot financially for that, but have no regrets. He went in a shy, smart kid, and came out a dynamic, friendly, confident person who later became a star salesperson, manager and business director. For someone who was a shy introvert, he is now incredibly outgoing and skilled at managing other people and their issues, and, despite being just as uncoordinated and bookwormish as I am, he never experienced the kind of social alienation I went through. He blossomed at school into a kid who was well-liked and respected, and who was unfailingly kind to others. Even the odder ducks in his class were treated with respect.

I would have done great in a place like that. My parents actually wanted to pull me out of public school at one point, but I resisted strongly. For one thing, I would have needed to repeat a year. For another, I feared that being thrown in with a whole new set of elite kids would just be a repeat of what was already happening, and I didn't want any further proof of my inability to fit in. The devils I knew were better than the ones I didn't. In retrospect, I wish they had overruled my objections, but I also realize it would have been very difficult for them financially, and I do appreciate that I received a top-rate education nonetheless.

I'd like to think that I believe in public education, and I do believe one can get an outstanding public education in many places. But after a lot of soul-searching, I don't think it's the right choice for our kids, especially for Melrose. When we moved here we were told our district cluster was one of the best, but have since learned that it's actually kind of so-so, mostly because it's huge. With all the development going on out here, the schools are crowded, classes are huge, and facilities overwhelmed. The middle and high school are 20 minutes away, and currently there is no elementary school to check out, because it's still being built. Nobody seems to have any numbers on how big classes will be, etc. Factor that in with my intense dislike for No Child Left Behind and the teaching-to-the-test mentality that seems to predominate American public schools, and the insights I've gotten from friends and relatives who are teachers or school personnel, and the fact that some friends of ours (who are very easygoing, mellow people) pulled all four of their kids out of our public system last year and sent them to parochial school because they didn't like what was going on, and it's not exactly warm fuzzies.

Choosing public school would clearly be much less financial pressure on us, and would give me the freedom to change careers, go back to school, or work a reduced schedule and so on. But I also feel that parenthood means doing what is best for your children, even if that means sacrificing, and I don't think sending a child like Melrose to a huge regional school system would be good for her in many ways. I'd rather send her and her brother to schools where I know they will be loved, nurtured, and get the best education they can, and where I have recourse to expect they will be respected and valued for who they are, even if that means we give up other things we want out of life. What would we spend that tuition money on anyway? Nice cars? They'd get trashed. Shopping at fancy boutiques? They don't have anything in my size. Eating out more? We'd get even fatter. Travel? We don't have enough vacation time to do much else. Home improvements? We already have a nicer house than I'd ever dreamed of. Join a country club? We don't swim, golf, or play tennis. I'd rather buy my kids academic rigor, nurturing, community, and social confidence than anything else on the planet. If that means I don't get a brand-new new car until they're out of college, I can live with that. I just have a harder time with the fact that I have to keep working, full time, and making at least what I'm making now for us to afford it at all. Even if my job drives me nuts. No going back to school, or starting my own business, or cutting back my hours.

So now we've applied to School #1 and School #2. Both seem like wonderful, nurturing places with rigorous academics, mandatory sports, and strong character education. Both have great reputations. Both require uniforms (yessss! no more clothing-choice battles!). Both made favorable impressions on both Melrose and ourselves. Both are places we think our kids would be happy and do well.

School #1 is just around the corner on a farm converted to a campus, and has a warm, friendly atmosphere and nice, relatively new academic buildings. We loved the people we met there, it's an excellent location in our own community, and Melrose had a stellar visit day. The one major drawback for both of us is that the school only goes through 8th grade, and is pretty insistent that it will remain as such. This would mean we'd have to go through the admissions hoopla all over again with our 13-year-olds, and even if they beat out the competition and got into their favorite high school, they would have to go through some pretty major adjustment to new schools and friends at an age when that's very difficult.

School #2 is my husband's beloved alma mater, actually, and I have gotten familiar with it after years of attending alumni events. Just around the time we moved here, School #2 decided to sell its longtime campus, which is too far away for us to even consider applying, and build a new campus from scratch on a farm about 30 minutes south of here. This means Melrose would be part of the first class of pre-Ks to start there, and the entire campus would be new. She really enjoyed visiting there too, although her day there was not as good as we would have hoped (I'll save that story for another day). It's one of the top academic programs in the area, and more of a reach for us in terms of competitiveness, logistics, and the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses factor (lots of wealthy Main Line families, luxury cars, etc.). Still, I found the staff and other parents very warm, welcoming, and friendly, and ditto for the alums and others I've met at the events over the years. It also has an Episcopalian theological focus, whereas School #1 is nondenominational. The big drawbacks are the distance (we'd have to get her to and from school ourselves next year, and it's not exactly convenient), it costs a little more, and as with the public school, the campus is a big construction site right now and there are a lot of unknowns.

We should learn in the next month whether Melrose got into either school. If she gets into one but not the other, we're going with the one she gets into. If she gets into neither, she stays put and we'll reapply for next year. If she gets into both, then we have to really consider the logistics and the atmosphere and various other details. We're trying not to be overly biased by our knowledge of School #2 and to give School #1 fair consideration. Stay tuned....