Emrick’s Enrolling in Preschool

I’m not sure how it is elsewhere, but around here preschool enrollment for the fall starts in January or February, depending on the school. I’d thought about enrolling Emrick this past August, but there were two problems with that: 1) he wasn’t fully potty trained, and 2) he wasn’t yet three when the local preschools were starting classes. All of the preschools I researched online required that students already be age three by the time class started, so sending Emrick to preschool this past fall was a no-go. And that’s just as well. With the Kindergarten cut-off age in Utah being September 1, Emrick won’t be able to start until August 2016. So holding off on preschool until 2014 makes more sense, as I don’t think he needs more than two years of it before starting Kindergarten.

A couple of weeks ago, Marcus and I toured a pre-school (actually, it’s Preschool through Grade 8) that is very close to our house. I knew this school existed, but I had no idea they had a preschool until I got a postcard advertising it in the mail. (As it turns out, this particular school will admit children who are just two years and nine months, which doesn’t matter to us at this point, I guess). This school makes a big deal about how they are academically focused; they’ll teach your kid to think; they’re not a glorified daycare, yada yada. And that’s all good, but also IT IS CLOSE TO OUR HOUSE.

So I filled out an application for the school and hope to get it turned in tomorrow. I am sure Emrick will benefit from the academics, but the main reason we are sending him is so that he can have more time interacting with kids his age. He needs that socialization, and of course, I think it will help him to slowly ease into the practice of spending all day at school in a few years. There are various school schedules offered, and the application asks for my top three preferences. My first preference is the morning class for two days a week; my second pref is the afternoon class for two days a week; my third preference is the three-day-a-week morning class. They offer five-day-a-week and all-day programs, but thankfully, those are not necessary for us at this time.

A birth certificate is to be submitted with the application. I’d never bothered to obtain a copy of Emrick’s after he was born, so I asked Marcus to pick one up because his work is relatively close to the Utah County Health and Justice building. I also asked him to get a copy of Holly’s as long as he was down there. So tonight when he brought the kids’ birth certificates home, I looked them over and noticed a mistake on Holly’s. Her BC says that she weighed 7 lb., 6 oz. at birth, when in fact she weighed 7 lb., 5 oz.

I know. On a scale from one to ten for how much something matters, this mistake does not even register. It’s like -2. But here’s the thing. When the birth certificate clerk at the hospital had me review her typed info before submitting it to the Health Department, I caught her mistake then and I pointed it out to her. She then compared her typed form with the handwritten one that I’d filled out (and from which she’d taken the information for the typed form), and she agreed that she’d accidentally entered the wrong weight. She told me to make a notation on the form and she would fix it, so I did. But obviously, she submitted the faulty information anyway. Again, I know this mistake isn’t going to keep Holly out of Astronaut school, or the White House, but still, details matter. I despise inaccuracies, and I will always be just a little bothered that her bc is wrong, even though I know that the piece of information in question is so inconsequential as to make it the worst waste of time in the world if I were to actually try to have it changed. But arrrrgh.

Anyway, preschool!