The calendar on our fridge has four colors this year. Blue is Dana's shifts, green is my school and coaching stuff, purple is Maya, orange is Nico. Maya picked the colors and bought the markers with her own allowance, so Maya also gets to tell us when we've used the wrong one. This week the calendar is mostly green, because teachers went back last Thursday and the kids don't start until this Thursday, August 14.
That gap is the strangest week of my year. I'm back in the gym by 7 every morning, and at home the kids are still on summer time, eating cereal at nine and asking what we're doing today.
Planning week, from my side
Teacher planning days are meetings, paperwork and a lot of counting. I inventory the PE closet every August, and this year it came to 63 dodgeballs, two of them flat, and a bag of jump ropes that had knotted itself into one large jump rope over the summer. My main job before the first bell, though, is the heat plan. We start the year outside with a heat index that can push past 105, so I map out water breaks, shade and which classes move indoors on the worst afternoons.
Baseball is far away. The school-year planner already has tryouts circled for the last week of January, and that's the last I want to think about it until after winter break.
The kids needed somewhere to be during my planning days. Dana covered the two days she was off, Rafael and Marisol took them two days in Westchester, and one afternoon they came to school with me and helped pump up balls. Nico now believes my job is mostly air.
A new first grader and a fourth grader with opinions
Nico starts first grade on Thursday as a five-year-old and turns six the following Tuesday, which he considers a technicality. He's excited about having a real desk and worried that first grade has homework. It does. He asked if I have homework. I do.
His supply list said no toys. He asked if a rock counts as a toy. We agreed that one small rock in a pocket is not a toy, it's a rock, and he picked a smooth gray one from his windowsill collection, origin unknown, which is probably for the best. He also managed to lose one brand-new sneaker before school even started. Nico loses one shoe per trip, and apparently a back-to-school shopping trip counts. It turned up two days later under the folded third row of the Pilot.
Maya is nine and starting fourth grade, and she has thoughts. The folders have to be plastic, not paper. The planner has to have a week-at-a-glance page. Her supply list came back from the store checked off in purple, with two items starred because the store didn't have the right kind. She reads by headlamp in bed, the same cheap headlamp she uses at camp, and the hardest part of our reset is getting that headlamp turned off.
The reset at home
We treat the week before school like packing for a trip, because that's the one routine all four of us already know. A few things that helped this year:
- Bedtime came back in steps. Summer bedtime had drifted to 9:30. We moved it 15 minutes earlier every night until Nico was at 8:15 and Maya at 8:45. A bit like preseason, you don't start with the full workout.
- Mornings depend on Dana's shifts. On her shift days she's out the door at 6:40 for a 7 a.m. start, so I take both kids to before-care at 7 and get to my school by 7:20. On her days off she does drop-off and I leave early.
- Lunches get packed the night before, from a list taped inside a cabinet door, the same way our camp list lives on the tent bin.
- Camping gear went back to the carport storage room, including the tent, which is clean and dry now after its mildew scare.
The calendar helps more than anything. Dana self-schedules her shifts about six weeks out, so the fridge always shows the next month and a half of who is where. It's also how she guards the things she won't work: both kids' birthdays, and anything we've circled in all four colors.
Right now there's only one thing on the August page circled in all four colors. It's Labor Day weekend, two nights at Pennekamp. On Thursday at 7 a.m. I'll drop two kids at before-care, drive to my own school and blow a whistle at a gym full of teenagers, and if history is any guide, one of us will be missing a shoe.
