First day of school

One thing I wasn't prepared for when moving up here was the amount of choice we'd have. Choice of time slots for skating lessons, even though registration was two weeks ago (no more 6am Sundays furiously dialling on three phones to enroll the kids in the sport of choice!), choice of daycares, choice of schools even!

In Toronto, you go to your neighbourhood school and if you want something else (French Immersion, for example), you're at the mercy of the school board and where they have slots to fill. If we had stayed, and wanted French Immersion, we would have had to ship the kids off to a school in a bad neighbourhood 20 minutes away. We declined.

Here, we had three schools to choose from: the English Catholic school (at the end of our street), the French Immersion (FI) Catholic school (a 5 minute bus ride away), or the public English/French Immersion school also at the end of our street.

Although we were pretty sure we were going to send him to the FI Catholic school (better facilities, more funding, etc.), we thought we should probably do our due diligence and check out the public school at the end of the street. The lure of walking the kids to school and being able to meet local parents was strong, since that's how we met a lot of our friends and neighbours in Toronto. I loved the sense of community and how we'd pick kids up along the way each morning, so that some days there were 4 or 5 of families walking with us.

We headed over to the school and were a bit surprised to find it a hotbed of activity since school wasn't slated to start for another week...or so we thought!

With Labour Day so late this year, the public board here decided to start a week early! We entered the school and the first person we bumped into happened to be the principal. We instantly connected with her and she made us feel completely at home. Although the facilities may not be sparkly and new like the other schools, we knew it was the right choice.

So the photo above was taken on the second day of school, but Junior's first day. At the end of the day he ran up to me and said "I learned how to say "dinosaur" in French!" And the rest, as they say, is l'histoire...