I am "that parent"

We're now into week four of school and slowly settling into a routine. So far, I've managed to loose Lala's name button for school twice and forget homework once. I've also spent a lot of time writing carefully crafted email to her teacher... I'm really trying not to be a helicopter parent, but there is a lot going on that I just can't see or control.  Things like, why do I keep getting these notices that we owe lunch money? Lala isn't eating school lunch, is she? She's five, so she's not really understanding my questioning. She doesn't get the concept of hot lunch vs. cold lunch. A week later, I'm finally told that she's eating breakfast at school.

Ok, after eating a very early breakfast and getting to school a couple of hours later, it's like a snack for her... I'm cool with it. Until I hear things like "I had chocolate milk every day!" or "We had tri*x yogurt!". Does this sound like a healthy breakfast? Says the parent whose children know the MacDonald's menu by heart.

So, I start looking at the website, calling around and end up chatting with the head of the school lunch program all about how to prevent my child from drinking chocolate milk and eating tri*yogurt for breakfast. Because apparently, I am that parent.

First Day of School

This summer, I had planned to do much more writing. Unfortunately for the writing, I also planned to not have the kids in daycare... you can see the conflict there, can't you.

I was a total soccer mom this summer. I put over 5000 miles on my car in three months! We did ballet, soccer (of course), swim lessons, hiking, camping, staying at the lake, BBQing. You name it, we did it.

The kids were not happy that it's come to an end. The cuddler begged to go to the gym with Mom (Mom really wanted to too!) and Lala was not happy to be at daycare - even though they've been going for the past week while I put my classroom together. You'd think a few weeks of careful preparation wouldn't result in such dismay. Of course, Mom was running around saying "First Day of School" and channeling Nemo all morning, so that may have had something to do with it.

The big news is that Lala is now in Kindergarten! Today was the meet and greet session with the other children and parents. Lala is going to be using her full first name as there is another girl with the shortened version - she's used to that. The slightly weird part was when we had to fill out the "getting to know you" page for the classroom book. It asked how many siblings did the child have. Normal question... Lala wanted to have a number of them all. Which is a large number... but she doesn't know all of the names off hand. She hasn't seen all of her brothers in over a year - one she's never seen at all. But how do you explain that or not have her put on the spot? And then I had to say to her, "are you ok with telling the other kids you are adopted?" Her reply was "what's adopted?" yeah, so we've apparently never really used that word...? What a quagmire. I decided just to write down the number she wanted and go with it. She's five and remembering the names of a large number of siblings would be hard for any kindergartner who was put on the spot. Right?