Soooo. . . . .

I once again tormented our practice administrator to rearrange my schedule to be able to attend the Back to School Ice Cream Social at Wicoff Elementary School this afternoon, and

a)  Thea spent at least an hour this morning having tears and angst over having to visit her new school;

b) having 71 lbs. sitting on one's lap to be comforted eventually will make not one but two legs go numb, more so because another 35 lbs was trying to get in on the lap action;

c) 96 degrees is 96 degrees, even if there is a bit of shade;

d) an ice cream social, in my mind, is not those little cafeteria cups of chocolate/vanilla ice cream that were probably manufactured when I was in elementary school, circa 1968;

e) Thea is in the largest of the five 2nd grade classes, which is a really brilliant decision on the part of those who make that type of decision, a new child coming from a private school who has never been in a room of more than 13 or so children, genius, pure genius;

f) her teacher did not make a brilliant first impression in her welcome letter; numbers below ten should be spelled out, even I remember that little composition factoid, and I wasn't won over by actually meeting her as she seems to have few skills for drawing out a shy child;

g) did I mention it was 96 degrees?  And there were a few hundred noisy children, and their parents and siblings?  It was like being at Chuck-E-Cheese, if Chuck-E-Cheese was relocated to Hades;

h) and despite two potty trips before leaving for the event, Micah sounded the "I have to go potty" alarm; I found an officious looking person carrying a clipboard and asked her where the restrooms were and was told, "Oh, you'll have to find the Dr. Wellborn (the principal) because the building is not technically open."   You. Must. Be. Joking.  An event with several hundred little bladders running around and there is no provision for restrooms?  Really?  And I'm supposed to find a man I've seen once four weeks ago out of a crowd of 400 to 500 people while dragging around one child who doesn't want to be there and another doing the pee-pee dance?  Thank you very sparsely. My irritation with this place deepened about a dozen notches.

i) I went to talk with the woman manning the Girl Scouts table, and she wanted a completed contact form and to have the parent check off a volunteer position box; I'm not even sure if my child is interested and she wants commitment;

i) and even though the event was only an hour, Thea was begging to leave by 2:30 pm, and I could not really see much of a reason to stay.

Thus ended our first encounter with the larger Wicoff community. 

The only good thing to come out of it was that a boy who went to kindergarten with Thea will be in her class, and Thea perked up slightly when I told her she could speak Chinese with Brett and no one would know what they were saying.