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.

We haven’t posted in a while, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t say something about the latest transition in Julia’s life. As of yesterday, she’s officially done with preschool and is happily ensconced in “Junior K,” which is a kind of Kindergarten prep course offered by the private daycare / school she’s been in since Julie went back to work. The theory is that it’s a somewhat more structured, classroom-oriented environment than the one at the preschool, which will help ease the transition to real Kindergarten next year.

A lot of people we’ve talked to about this have scoffed at the idea, and not without reason, but we’re hoping it’ll be a good step for Julia. In particular, I’m optimistic that the slightly more classroom-like environment will keep her interested and engaged and possibly push her a bit harder than she would be on the normal pre-K track; I think she behaves better when she’s challenged. We’ll see how things pan out.

That aside, this is a pretty big change for Julia. We still drop her off at the preschool on Lincoln near our house, but at 8:00 she’s bused over to a different campus where the Junior K class meets. Then, at the end of the day, she’s loaded back into a van and trucked back to Lincoln, where we pick her up.

We actually dropped her off at Junior K ourselves yesterday for the first day of class. We wanted to help her get settled and meet her teacher. She’s got her own desk with her name on it, and it’s chock-full of real, honest-to-God school supplies: glue, notebooks, scissors, No. 2 pencils… the works. It was exciting to see, but at the same time, it left me feeling a bit melancholy. If I get this worked up over Junior K, I’m going to be a complete wreck when she graduates from college.

Today, she got to take the bus to school in the morning for the first time. In typical fashion for Julia, she showed a bit of trepidation when the driver called her name to line up, and I wound up holding her hand all the way to the front of the line. In the end, though, she was happy as a clam once she was aboard and settled into a booster seat: she barely looked my way as the van backed out and drove off.

Joseph was actually far more affected by the process than Julia was, and not because he missed his sister. “Daddy, I want to get on bus,” he announced after Julia had clambered into her seat.

“I’m sorry, Joe,” I said, “you can’t get on the bus. The bus is for the big kids who are going to Junior K. When you get bigger and bigger—”

“NO, DADDY! I WANT TO GET ON BUS!” He was crying now, headed for a full-scale meltdown. “I WANT TO GET ON BUS,” he repeated between wails.

I did my best to calm him down. I didn’t want to leave until the van departed, just in case the child whose routine was actually being turned upside-down ran into problems.

“That’s Julia’s bus,” I said. “When you go to Junior K—”

Joseph was having none of it. “I WANT TO RIDE JO-JO’S BUS,” he wailed. “I WANT TO GET ON BUS!”

This continued past the time the van pulled away, all the way down the sidewalk to the infant side of the daycare, through the sign-in process inside, and into Joe’s classroom. Finally, after an additional minute or so of tears, he stopped crying, sobbed once, sniffed, and said, “OK.” And that was that.