Preschool Insanity

I have spent close to $500 on preschool application and wait list fees over the past 12 months. I say this both to confess my sin and to publicly shame myself into stopping the insanity. And the hours I have spent researching online and visiting God only knows how many schools? I don’t even want to think about it. After all of that, I hired a college girl to come to our house three mornings a week through the summer.

Now her last day with us is looming large, and I’m back to the same quandary that pushed me to hire her in the first place: I can’t find my perfect preschool home. The places I do manage to kind of like are either for older preschoolers or have a wait list I should have gotten on when I was pregnant. On top of that, I can’t decide what I want education wise (Traditional? Montessori? Waldorf? Parochial?) or schedule wise (Full time? Mother’s day out? Full days 2 or 3 days a week? Mornings only but every day?). The options are endless. So I put myself on the wait list at every place I kind of like, and continue on with my research, my visits, and my filling out of wait list forms.

The search should be over at this point. We are in a good position on the wait list at a preschool I immediately liked very much, where the girls can go next fall. I have already paid the hefty registration fee for a two-mornings-a-week Mother’s Day Out program at a nearby church, which starts August 25. Yet I spent the better part of the last hour researching a couple of other places – this one is on acres of land with a horse stable attached! That one has the children gardening and hiking and sewing and caring for a variety of farm animals every day!! Why would I put them in city preschools with pea-gravel and plastic playgrounds when they could be learning to live off the land!!!

I didn’t think much about any of these things while I was pregnant because I used to know that the best indicator for a child’s success is having involved, well-informed parent advocates. But having the luxury of choice and an insane variety of opportunities has turned me into a lunatic. Yesterday I was walking through Sears and I saw a girls' dorm room display. I smiled as I glimpsed ahead to the day I’d be helping my girls get their dorm rooms ready. Then I immediately began to panic – college applications, campus visits (in-state? out-of-state? private? public?), application consultants, SAT prep courses? I think I better start saving now for the pre-college exploration fund I'll most certainly need. . .