This post is only about two months late, but it roughly corresponds which Julia’s five-year checkup, which was just a couple weeks ago. According the doctor, she’s now three feet, seven inches all—they measure in feet and inches now, instead of just inches, which is a little bittersweet—and weighs thirty-nine pounds.

Julia’s also about two months into her kindergarten career, and she’s loving it, though I think she enjoys the after-school care run by the YMCA as much, if not more so, than school itself. She likes her teacher, Mrs. Romero, tremendously, but it’s not entirely clear what Mrs. Romero thinks of Julia.

The class uses an interesting disciplinary system. There are green, yellow and red apples posted on a bulletin board, along with the kids’ names. Every day, each child starts out on the green apple. Kids who are well-behaved stay on the green apple; kids who need to be reminded to listen or follow the rules move down to the yellow apple, though they can move back up to green if they pay particular attention to being good. Kids who don’t heed warnings or commit gross violations of the rules end up on the red apple for the day. At the end of the week, Mrs. Romero sends home a green, red or yellow certificate summarizing each child’s performance during the week.

Things started out well enough for Julia, and she was on green for the first month or so. But then things took a decided turn for the worse: she brought home red certificates for two consecutive weeks and a yellow certificate last week, which would seem to imply that she’s spent a fair amount of time on the red apple. Worse, for a while there, she was actually telling us that she was on the green apple every evening, so either there’s been a terrible case of mistaken identity or our darling daughter as learned to be a bit flexible with respect to the truth. We’re not quite sure exactly what happened on each occasion, but we’re told that spitting was involved at least once.

On the plus side, yellow is a step up from red, so at least we’re on an upward trajectory.

Obligatory Joe note: he’s now more or less completely potty trained, and we finally put away (well, hid in the shower) his potty chair last weekend. Naturally, he rewarded us by having two accidents yesterday morning.

So much for the momentum we were trying to build with that last post. Suffice it to say that it’s been a long summer that’s gone by very quickly.

Julia starts kindergarten in a little less than two weeks. There, I said it. But I don’t have to like it. Since the end of Junior K, she’s been having a grand old time at summer camp at the Y. So much so that I’m a little worried that she’s going to be upset when school starts again; she shouldn’t start feeling that way until at least third grade, right?

She’s going to be attending Booksin Elementary in the San Jose Unified School District, which is a little bit scary: apparently, we picked the worst possible year to have a child entering the public school system, as the state of California’s budget is an all-out train wreck and, thanks to the wonders of California politics, the state’s financial woes directly impact local school systems (where by “impact” I mean “bend, fold and mutilate”). The net result is that kindergarten class sizes have increased to around 30 across the district.

We gave some thought to keeping Julia at Primary Plus for another year or moving her to another private school, but Booksin had been very well regarded—at least before the news of the budget cuts hit. We’ll just have to see how things shake out.

Meanwhile, Joe continues his merry amble through preschool. We think he’s starting to get anxious in the particular classroom he’s in, because most of his friends have already moved up to the next room. Unfortunately, the powers-that-be have determined that Joe’s potty training isn’t quite up to snuff yet, and on some days, it’s pretty hard to argue with them. That said, he’s started to approach us about using the potty just before (or sometimes just after) he needs to, so it appears that we’re finally making progress on that front. Theoretically, he should be moving up to Room C at the end of the month.

Continuing our torrid pace, we’ve uploaded another set of photos this weekend. This one focuses on Julia’s dance class, with a few other snapshots from earlier this year thrown in for good measure. At the rate we’re going, we’ll be caught up in a few short weeks; it helps that we took dramatically fewer pictures this year than last.

Joe’s all set for his first day of preschool tomorrow morning, so it should be an interesting day. I’m expecting the drop-off to be a bit rough. Back in the infant center, he was usually OK if I got him there early enough that the kids were still inside playing; if they were already out on the playground, tears were almost sure to be shed. I think the added noise and confusion were just too much for him to deal with.

Preschool will be even tougher, because even when the classes are still inside, the different age groups are commingled until class officially starts at 9:00: the two-year-olds like Joe are mixed in with bigger kids who are four or five. The older kids tend to be a bit more rambunctious than the little ones, so it wouldn’t surprise me if Joe were to have a hard time coping. We’ll see how it goes.

It’s been an eternity since we posted any pictures that were less than eleven months old, so we spent a few minutes this weekend scanning this year’s class pictures and created separate albums for Julia and Joseph. The plan is to keep these albums up-to-date as the kids move through the school system, or at least until our freebie scanner kicks the bucket.

Now, the scary news. We got a bit of a surprise in the sign-in book at Joe’s daycare this week: written notice informing us that he’s going to start visiting the preschool this Monday and will be moving up for good on November 17. Obviously, this is a good thing: Joe’s been the oldest kid in the infant center for a month or two now, and a lot of his friends have already moved up. Developmentally, he’s more than ready (though it’d be nice if he showed a little more interest in using the toilet). Still, it’s a bit of a bittersweet change for us: after four-plus years, it will be very strange not to have anyone to drop off at the baby school, as Julia calls it.

The quest to catch up continues: today, we uploaded the pictures from our trip to Chicago last Thanksgiving. You can find them here.

We’re not only about stale pictures, though. Last week, Julia took the first test of her budding academic career and got a perfect 20 out of 20. Of course, the test was actually a fundraiser (the “Spell-a-thon”), for which parents were supposed to pledge a dollar amount for each correct answer, so I suspect the school’s motives weren’t entirely academic in nature. But, still: 20/20!

Having read the foregoing, you might be wondering, “Spell-a-thon? How many words can a four-year-old spell?” You certainly wouldn’t be alone in doing so. As it turns out, in order to make sure that the Junior K kids didn’t miss out on the Spell-a-thon experience, they were given a short oral exam featuring questions like this:

• What number is this? 5
• What letter is this? B b
• What shape is this? (imagine a little square here)
• Tell me something red:

It probably says something that Julia’s answer to the last question was “blood,” but we haven’t quite figured that one out yet.