How to accessorize for The School Meeting |
One of the little pleasures of having school going children would
have to be the school meetings. Be they
parent teacher meetings, First Holy Communion ones or starting school the
following year gatherings.
I like to look on them as a little gift from the school.
A little gift to me.
I get to sit in a chair and have a chat with another adult for at least 15 uninterrupted minutes. Parent teacher meetings are great!
All that’s missing is coffee. Of course, I could bring my own.
The meeting I attended recently was the aforementioned
enrolment meeting.
Bearing in mind I have previously gone to two other meetings
of the very same nature but I am going to gloss over that unimportant semantic.
It doesn’t matter to me that I already know about the
uniform and where to buy. Ditto the school book list. I am
familiar with free play and why it is not advisable to give your Naíonán Beaga
(Junior Infant) yogurts for lunch in a difficult to open lunch box.
I have been adhering to the “small treat allowed on Fridays”
healthy eating policy for four years now.
The staggered start and finish times don’t phase me anymore.
I was good to not go.
But of course I was going.
Forty minutes of me time was there for the taking.
And as I sat waiting for the meeting to commence something I
had suspected for a long time was cemented home; being the middle child in the
family can suck but it also has benefits.
In Lovely Liam’s case, one of those boons will come home to
roost in the guise of four friends starting in the same school, all of them in the
same classroom.
His older brothers did not have that advantage. I am hoping this will be a great assist in
helping him adjust to big school.
Alas I got so excited about the prospect of free time I
forgot this meeting was just the first of two; the enrolment one. The shorter one.
My shoulders stiffened and I sat up a bit straighter as
Muinteoir Sínead took off, speaking a bit faster than I was entirely happy
with. At this rate my forty minutes of
free time was going to be shaved down to thirty.
If I was lucky.
During the meeting, parents, especially those who are “first
timers,” were encouraged to ask questions and I mentally urged them on. Anything to stretch out the meeting a little
bit. I even toyed with the idea of
asking a few of my own.
Before I knew it Muinteoir Sínead was handing out the form
to be filled in and it was time to go.
Down the hallway and towards the front door.
But wait.
What’s that up ahead?
A queue. To the
oifig. Where we had to hand in our
completed forms and get the birth certs photocopied.
Great stuff. I joined
in earnest. And then realised, me the
mother of two boys who already attend, had done her homework and the certs were
copied on the way into the meeting.
Foiled at every twist and turn.
Ah well, there’s always the meeting in May. The long one.
School. Some of the
best days of your life. Particularly
when your kids go there.
Ha ha, I understand the need for *even* 15 minutes of brain space, this week, what with the full moon craziness left me lacking in any kind of brain space at all. Ohhh, I look forward to things calming down so I can breathe again!
ReplyDeleteMaybe you could organise some mentoring meetings whereby mothers who already have kids in the school meet with those who don't, in order to help them with all sorts of things. In a coffee shop. Or a pub..
ReplyDelete