Tales From the Minivan

I think I need to change the title of my Blog!  I honestly felt like I lived in the van this first week back at school!  We’re not sure if we’re going to be able to get transportation for the kids as this is not our area school.  I knew this was one of the drawbacks, but the other benefits outweighed this.  Just before we went on vacation I spoke to a reporter with our newspaper, I was very unhappy with how the Dept of Education handled the Elimination of the Early French Immersion program, especially the kids who were enrolled to start this fall.  Here’s the Full Story and the photo that appeared in the paper.  Oh and did I mention it was on the FRONT PAGE in colour!!!!!
Kids caught in game of musical schools by French immersion program changes

In the end we got Liam and Mackenzie into a school that offers French Immersion, so he wont have to attend 3 schools in the first 4 years of his schooling.  So I’m officially the mother to a Toddler, a Preschooler, a Grade Schooler and a Tween!  Liam started Grade 1 and has a really sweet teacher.  I did however notice that she’s expecting, so it looks like he may lose her at some point this year.

Day one was chaotic as the kids were not on any class lists and we had to get that all sorted out.  Thank goodness Andrew came with me, or I would have been stressing a lot more than I already was. Liam was really nervous and the extra waiting did not help matters, but once he met his teacher and got settled into his classroom he seemed to do fine.

Mackenzie also was a little nervous and I had to stick around to quickly speak to her teacher to let her know I was picking her up early for an orthodontist appointment.  I know bad timing on my part, but this was the second time I had to reschedule this appointment.  We met her teacher and found out that in her class she has 4 kids from her other school!  We found this really funny, as her old class only had 17 students!  Their numbers must be really low this year!

Day 2 went much smoother and I managed to grab a couple of pics as well.  Mackenzie wasn’t overly happy about it, but I made her anyway!  That afternoon I ran into the kids bus driver from last year who was wondering why we were at this school and asked if we moved.  He also informed me that his run has him driving right by our house, and he’d be happy to drop them off!  Now I need to find out if the District will OK this.  If I can get transportation at least one way that will be great!  Maybe I’ll use the whole save the environment argument.  If there’s already a huge diesel guzzling bus going right by my house why should I have to take out my minivan everyday too?

Liam in his class

Thursday I spent the afternoon at the Mazda Dealership getting a brake light bulb replaced.  It was kind of fun, as I was checking out the new Mazda 5.  The boys loved it, as it was a lot easier to get into than our van.  It seats 6, has 4 car seat tether anchors and UAS/Latch in the 2 middle row seats. The other cool feature is that it has sliding doors just like a minivan.  To me this is a great bonus, as I just don’t trust these gusts of wind we get and heavy doors and little boys just don’t mix.  There was only a couple of negatives that I could see.  One was that it didn’t have a lot of cargo room  this would be a problem for us when we travel, I guess we could alwas buy one of those cargo boxes for the top?  The other negative was that only the late 2008 and 2009 models have rear A/C.  This was on my must have list, as our van doesn’t have it and I promised that the next vehicle will.  I refuse to buy a brand new vehicle so we may have to wait a couple of years to get one of these used with the rear air.  It would be nice to go back to a smaller car, but I think our reality will be a minivan.  So there you have it, another new blog title:  My Life Sentence- The Minivan!

The boys in the RX-8- they thought they were so cool!

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 7th, 2008 at 12:13 am and is filed under Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.