All of our kids go to school during the day, when my wife and I are at work.  Our two boys, J and G, go to one school, and our daughter E goes to another.   Each school is part of the same affiliated system, but at the moment, E is too young to attend the one that J and G attend.  If you are saying to yourself, gosh, I wonder if that is inconvenient, I can confirm that it is.  Getting three young children out the door is tricky enough, especially in the middle of winter, when they not only need to be woken up and dressed and pottied and fed, but also bundled in puffy winter jackets and stuffed into car-seats like extra clothing in an overflowing suitcase.  Having two drop-offs – and thus having to unload, then load, then unload again at least one child – is enough to make me want to start drinking heavily the moment I get to my office, assuming I make it there at all.  On these circus-like mornings, I sometimes wonder what decision making process led us to conclude that having three children with two full-time, out-of-the-home jobs and no family living within a 100-mile radius of us was a smart idea.  My mind then begins to wander.  Maybe it was the product of heady over-confidence.  At the time we decided to go for it, we were just getting the hang of being parents of multiple children.  We were going to restaurants and actually eating the food.  We took a few trips on airplanes.  We even were going on some dates (gasp!!!).   In short, we were getting into a little rhythm.  But maybe we over-interpreted that, thinking that we were somehow kicking Parenting’s ass (Footnote #1).  Maybe we were like a football team in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, marching convincingly down to the one-yard line and ready to punch it across the goal-line for the win.  All we needed to do was simply hand the ball off to our running back, who could have tripped once we gave him the ball and still scored the touchdown.  Instead, we decided to call for a passing play, thinking we were just that good, forgetting that the game still hung precariously in the balance, and that we still had less points than they did (I feel like I’ve seen this before somewhere…).

Back on defense we went.

The two drop-off thing will change in about a month or two, when E will be old enough to join J and G at their school.  Words like Hallelujah and visions of white sanded beaches on tropical islands immediately come to mind as I type these words (Footnote #2).  As welcome of a change as this will be (we hope), I got to thinking this morning about how J and G have always been at their current school, having started when they were old enough to go.  That makes E’s school the first that we, as parents, will say good-bye to.

The school is a converted split-level house, off a local side road near Route 30, the main thoroughfare that runs through all the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia.  The top half of the sandstone brick exterior is covered with grey vinyl siding, and the square or near square windows are lined on each side by light orange shutters.  In front of the school there is a low-scale playground enclosed by a split rail fence, where two large trees, a maple and a magnolia, stand on each side of a Little Tikes-like clubhouse with a small green slide.  In the back of the school, there is a higher-grade playground that has a blue, truck shaped jungle-gym and a wooden swing set and a few other things for the older children to play on.  Along the side of the school, a brown deck leads to a garden area toward the back corner of the lot, where well-maintained plants and pruned shrubbery provide a partial buffer against the adjacent parking lot, and allow the children to explore a very small part of the natural world.

The inside of the school has two levels.  About two-thirds of the top level is devoted to the toddler class, for children ranging in age from eighteen months to three years.  The other third, separated by a tall book case and a small baby gate, is for the babies, which, of course, is where E goes, or is supposed to go (lately, I am told, she has been clamoring to join the older gang, a chance she will soon get).  It’s a relatively small space, but perfect for keeping track of babies and emerging toddlers, of which there are no more than four or five at any given time.  There are a few toys and puzzles and block-sets for them to manipulate, all neatly organized on low wooden bookshelves.  Toward the back of the area, there is a separate room, darkened by heavy curtains and filled with cribs, which is used for naps.

When arrive in the morning, I see other parents on the same schedule, pulling their children out of car-seats and remembering to grab their various bags, some filled with nap-sheets and blankets, others with ice-packs and sippy cups of milk.  We do our best to exchange appropriate good-morning greetings while managing all of this.  When I get E in, I take off her puffy winter jacket and put it in her cubby.  I write in a small spiral notebook, where the teachers and I exchange notes as to wake-up times and food consumption and nap-lengths.  I chit-chat with the teacher who typically covers the early mornings, a twenty-something in graduate school at West Chester.  By the time that is all finished, E has settled in; long gone are the days when she had trouble being dropped off.  After making a few rounds about the room, she toddles over to the wooden, baby-sized high-chairs.  Then she lifts up the tray and sits herself down and looks around at us.  It’s time for breakfast.  It’s also time for me to go.

And soon it will be time for E to go, to move on from the “baby school”, as I (wrongly, but for convenience) refer to it to J and G.  Soon, there will another baby that will take her place, who will give her parents difficulty at first, but then settle right in, just like E did.  Soon, her laminated name tag will come off her cubby, and I’ll take her spiral notebook home, and not bring it back.  Maybe we’ll come back and visit, to say hello to the teachers and show them how big she’s gotten and how spunky she still is, and everybody will smile and marvel at it all.  But regardless of whether we do that or not, she’ll be, and we’ll all be, somewhere else.   There is something about a school – or, more accurately, leaving a school you or your child once attended – that has a strangely powerful way of demonstrating this fact of life.

We’ve got about a month left before we move on.  In the remaining mornings, I am sure that J will not want to eat whatever I suggest for breakfast, G will yell at J for not letting him finish his sentence, and E will pour her milk all over her high-chair tray and smile at me while she’s doing it.  I am sure that I will ask what led us to throw a pass when we were on the 1-yard line.  And I am sure that I will find consolation, however small, in the upcoming consolidation of the drop-offs.  But I will also try and remember that a good-bye is looming, and that it will soon need to be said.

(Footnote #1:  To be clear, we were not kicking anyone’s or anything’s ass.)

(Footnote #2: If not abundantly clear at this point, our perspective has been pretty badly distorted since we’ve become parents, perhaps unalterably so.)