This school year has been a blur. I remember when we put Zoe in school at 2 years old, we were so excited that the school encouraged parent involvement. I distinctly recall the director saying, “Have a skill? Come teach it to your child’s class! Just last week one child’s mom came in and brought an authentic Indian feast – and one mom taught her child’s class a Spanish lesson!”

Though we didn’t know what skill we might teach, we were sold.

Here we are, almost TWO school years later, and all we have to show for it is attending an end of school luau last year and helping (a little) with two major festivals. Oh, and though they have monthly Parent Association meetings, we’ve only attended ONE, in 2 years. Oops?

One thing we did do last year that we haven’t yet done this year is the Parent / Teacher conference – we simply haven’t had time (or made time?)… We generally don’t even see Zoe’s teacher, since “school” ends at 2:45 and we pick her up later, but this past week when school closed early on Tuesday, Bart saw Teacher Francesca and got a little update.

First, you need to know this:

• According to Zoe, each day the teacher asks what DAY it is, and the kid that quietly raises his/her hand and then knows the answer gets to put up the date.
• At the end of every day, we ask her about her day including “who put up the date today?” In fact, I went through a couple of weeks of quizzing her in the morning on what day it was, just so she’d be ready.
• We just went through a run of about 5 weeks where literally EVERY DAY, guess who got to put up the date? With a few exceptions – some days her friend Addie helped her (unlike the many weeks before where there were a variety of answers to that question).
• We were skeptical, asked her about it, she said she did it AND she knew the day, so we just went with it.
• Apparently every day they also read a book, and for several weeks in a row (also according to Zoe) they’ve been reading the Sheriff Callie book, a show she barely watches. We were concerned that they just kept reading the same book over and over (with a day or two of an “Elsa and Anna” book, of course).

So, when Bart ran into Teacher Francesca, she asked about our Parent / Teacher conference, said wonderful things about how bright and sweet our child was and then “If there were one thing she could work on, it would be Shenanigans.”

Not knowing what the heck she meant, Bart asked. To which she replied that Zoe has an active imagination, so he asked about “putting up the date” and the Sheriff Callie book. Guess what? Shenanigans.

He called Zoe over and asked her who put up the date that day, in front of Teacher Francesca, and with a sly look on her face she chose honesty: London did. And for now, we left it at that.

We’re heading in for an official conference on Monday, so I can’t wait to hear the rest of the story ;)

Stay tuned. And watch out for Shenanigans…