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Kindergarten and camp registration time

It's that special time again when those of us living in our type A communities rush around to schedule a summer's worth of activities for our kids. At $500 a week we feel nostalgic for the good old days when camp was more than a week long and kids played outside all day. N's preschool class from last year has organized a play date where we will all come with our camp research and plan our summers. Afterwards, I will send our schedule to several of B's friends to see what we can do. One of the parents I spoke with today told me of a camp where the kids are bused to a park where they can canoe. She referred to it as "Old School." In addition to preparing for camps, many of us are also scheduling school tours and going through the application process...

Today I scheduled two school tours and talked with three camp directors. One of the issues with all the planning is that many schools and camps have different deadlines. B is going to miss Pirate Camp, run by the Stanford Fencing and Sailing clubs, because his school gets out that week. I knew I was heading over the edge when I found myself contemplating having B miss his last week of school so he could join his preschool friends pretending to be pirates. Will he still get into the right college if he doesn't have experience with fencing at an early age? And we missed last year too...

Thinking about getting into the right school is painful enough but scheduling the tours, debating the merits of private versus public education as the school budgets here plunge to new lows, and then doing all the analysis required for a decision in early Feb. is daunting. Below are a few links to previous articles I wrote as I went through the school decision process with B for kindergarten. What I haven't done, but plan to do soon, is write up the issues we've had this year. My only advice is that if you enter a situation that doesn't work, you can change. Our after school program stopped working for us and we were able to change. Apparently the program went from 30 to 98 kids with no increase in staff or communication with us. It took months despair and frustration before I figured out my son's horrendous personality change could possibly be reversed if he didn't have to spend 3 and a half hours each day in a small space with 55 other kids after an already long day of trying to sit still. But more on that another day.