Pre School Dropout

So the main reason that I need to keep my husband around is to have someone to yell at me when I try to stay up until, lets say, 2 AM reading. For the second night in a row.

Also, to prevent me from having my annual pre school meltdown. Why does choosing a new pre school have to be such a pain in the ass? Why? Number two in the country, what that gets you is nine million pre schools all charging outrageous amounts just so that your kid can spend time with other kids and not be a social pariah. What does play-based even mean? Seriously, who buys that crap? I know kids can learn through play, but sitting them on a a carpet and letting them play with blocks by themselves for a half hour isn't play-based learning, it is baby sitting. It is not even baby sitting, I am pretty confident my baby sitter actually interacts on a one on one basis with my child, and I pay her a dollar and hour more than I pay pre school. Of course, she is now reading this and demanding a raise.

I love how when you broach the subject of pre-K skills with a prospective school they immediately treat you like you are high maintenance. While I am high maintenance, they don't know that yet. I'm not demanding that Olivia be taught to read by the time she finishes the program, I am simply trying to ascertain whether or not the subject of the alphabet will be, at any time, introduced to the classroom. Which, in some schools, it will not be. Why am I paying you?!? Seriously has the bar become so low that all I should expect from paid child care is that my kid is, relatively, unharmed when she is returned to me at the end of four hours?

God forbid you actually find a school that offers some semblance of a curriculum, accountability to the parents, etc you have to take out a second mortgage on your home to pay the tuition. Those of you out there are chuckling at my exaggeration, my witty hyperbole. Stop laughing, I am dead serious. We are talking private school tuition to send your kid to pre-k three days a week. One of the schools I am looking at right now would charge me $90 more than my already $377 a month, plus $125 registration fee, a $100 activity fee and I would have to put down an entire month's tuition as a deposit. And they would not even feed her lunch, I would have to pack her one. Still laughing? That's roughly $464 dollars a month to have some semblance of a basic curriculum for 48 hours a month. So, that is about what I pay my baby sitter. And she cooks my kid whatever she wants for dinner. That's more than a third of my mortgage for not even enough child care to hold down a part-time job!

So to sum up, I can pay roughly $8 an hour to have my kid thrown into room with a bunch of other kids to play with toys and maybe do an art project for four hours or I can pay $10 to have my kid actually do music, some basic foreign language, etc. Seriously, does she REALLY need this? I would way rather pay myself $400 bucks a month, I could enroll her in every damn class the park district offers for that much.

Why aren't we just keeping her at home? I never went to pre school and I don't consider myself socially stunted, but is it different now? With so many kids in full time care and two working parents, has the social dynamic changed? Is she already out of the loop because she is not used to being in care eight hours a day five days a week? Okay, so having Chad here would not have prevented the meltdown, it would have just prevented you from having to read about it.