That's a 4-foot fence in the background

We're stuck. Like really stuck. Since we live on a cul-de-sac off of a secondary road off of a main road, we're like the last place to get plowed. Eh. We live in New England. You'd think we'd be used to it by now.

The cat seems especially annoyed that we're all here today. Apparently we're cutting into her lay-around-the-house-and-be-lazy time. Sorry, feline. Do me a favor and go get a job. We need the extra cash.

I went to the kindergarten meeting here in town Tuesday night. Bad news is kindergarten here in our town is placement, not district. Say what? Since some schools only have 1/2 day kindergarten or 2 classrooms, if there are more children in the district than spots, they get shipped somewhere else for kindergarten only. Talk about difficulty transitioning. The good news is that we live in the district with the most spots since our school has 5 kindergarten classrooms, so we're guaranteed a spot at our neighborhood school (the same one I went to by the way).

I really feel for some of the families in town. They're worried about the transitions, about their kids making friends in kindergarten only to be whisked away from them the next year, about putting their tiny 4- or 5-year-olds on the scary school buses day after day, etc. The one district with the most kids (111 kids last year to be exact) has ZERO full day kindergarten openings. Seems it became a magnet school a few years ago and decided full day kindergarten wasn't necessary. So none of these kids have a homebase school. Unless families can somehow figure out how to find childcare for the remainder of the day since kindergarten is only 3 hrs long there, they HAVE to ship their kids off to a school that's possibly 8 miles away. That's kind of insane. And they're thinking of closing the closest elementary with full day kindergarten to that district in the coming school year as well. That means there will be absolutely NO schools besides the magnet school for the south section of town.

I don't get it.

While buying our house in a specific district was the whole reason we paid more for the house than it's probably worth, most people don't have that "luxury". It's expensive to live in this town regardless of what zip code you reside (though the north section has much higher mortgage payments). Both parents in the household need to work. Childcare is crazy expensive. I don't know how some families do it.

Sitting there, I realized once again how very lucky I am.