How I didn't freak out when my kids went to pre-school

I've really fallen down on the job here.  I was writing a post about our wonderful trip to my parents' house in Oregon, when the editor dude from CNN Headline News website asked me to write something about Ann Romney's speech at the RNC.  So I dropped everything and wrote it.  Then they decided I need to expand it and they'll run it over the weekend.  Now I've got nothing.

Except for a couple things I published elsewhere.

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The Urge to Purge

 

This would make a great companion piece to the post I haven't finished about visiting my parents.  It's about the part of the vacation where we finally clean out all the crap that we had been storing in their garage for the last eight years.  Read it on Aiming Low.

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Every Neighborhood Needs a Grumpy Old Man

This just came out in San Diego Uptown News.  It's about my hands-on approach to dealing with careless motorists in my neighborhood.  Read it on SD Uptown News. 

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How I Didn't Completely Freak Out about Sending my Kids to Preschool

I wrote this one for San Diego Family magazine.  Click this link for the whole column, or read the teaser and decide for yourself...

If you’re sending your youngsters to school for the first time this fall, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve got mixed feelings about it.  When I thought that our three-year-old twins were going to be attending their “safety school”—not our first choice, but one we were comfortable with—in September, I had felt a mixture of anticipation, anxiety, and wonder at the fact that they were already big enough to go to school. 

But then I got a call at the end of May from our “long shot” school: the one on whose waiting list we had put our girls when they were six months old.  They told me that they had two openings starting at the beginning of June (it’s a year-round school), for two days a week, and that if we didn’t decide right away, the spots would be snapped up by someone else. 

After a return visit to the school, we loved it even more than we had when we first toured it two-and-a-half years ago.  It seemed perfect for our girls, so we decided to go for it.

At that point, my feeling-mixture shifted to something more like equal parts giddiness, dread, and existential angst.  The prospect of school in September had still seemed distant.  The idea of sending them off within a couple of weeks, however, put me into a state of mild panic.  Had we stuck to the original plan, we would have had more time to emotionally prepare the kids; and, just as importantly, I would have had time to figure out what I would do with my days when they were in school.  After almost three years of being a full-time stay-at-home dad, I suddenly needed to figure out how to make myself useful when there were no kids around.  read more...

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Here are some random cute pictures...