Loving our new school, just not a fan of begging

We have been absolutely thrilled with our girls' catholic school experience thus far. They are learning prayers and collecting food for the local food pantry. Jo is truly reading and is learning to write words.
Even with Jo on crutches for her first 6 weeks of 5k, her new school transition was more or less smooth sailing.

On the other hand, CoCo was more challenging. The first week of school she was so excited to be riding the bus and going to school just like Big Sister! But there was one little hitch: our mini night warden was still in full force, making the early morning wake-ups rough on everyone.

We had registered CoCo for 3k Mon/Wed/Fri, mornings. There is no mid-day bus because nearly all the 3/4/5 yr olds stay at school all day. This meant I would pick up CoCo from school before lunch. We'd go home, eat lunch, read a couple books together and then she would happily go down for a nap.

The problem was I couldn't decide if I should set a timer and wake Cokes or just let her sleep. She was new at the whole school thing and also fighting a cold. More often than not I would let her sleep the whole afternoon. As in, CoCo would still be sleeping when Jo got off the bus at 3:45pm.

Hence, Coryn was not even close to being ready for bed by 8pm. Night after night Jo would slump into bed around 7:30, exhausted from a full day of school. While CoCo would be wide-eyed and alert and fidgety and noisy and not wanting to stay in bed.

8:30 - Cokes comes out of her room asking for a drink.
9pm - Cokes comes out of her room asking for a book to look at.
9:30pm - Cokes tells us to turn out the lights and go to bed and be absolutely silent - SHHH, No Talking!
10pm - Cokes declares, I don't like my room! I can't close my eyes!

And then, I heard from a school mom how her 3yr old twin boys (who share a bedroom) had magically become the world's easiest kids to put to bed at night. Before starting school she had the same bedtime battles as us. But now that her boys were in school all day, they were going to bed before 8pm, falling asleep right away and staying asleep all night.

I'm not one to blindly follow the crowd. Just because 95% of the preschoolers stayed all day didn't automatically make it right for my child to do the same.

 The thing was we had paid for the girls to ride the bus, but 3 or 4 mornings a week we weren't ready in time. Which meant I ended up driving them. And, as soon as I pulled up to school CoCo would get clingy and say she didn't want to go to school. And then Jo would say that she didn't want to go to school either. We needed to try something.

I talked to CoCo's teacher, asking if she'd be willing to let CoCo try staying for a full day on a trial basis. She gave us the green light. That was two weeks ago.

Since CoCo started staying all day at school, three things changed immediately:
1. BOTH Jo and CoCo are asleep in their beds by 7:30pm and stay in bed until I wake them at 6:45am.
2. CoCo insisted she is a Big Girl and didn't need to wear a diaper overnight anymore. She quit cold turkey and hasn't wet the bed.
3. No more sleeping in, even on the weekends. I don't set our school alarm for Saturday or Sunday, nevertheless the girls are awake and ready to play at 7am.

So, I have to say things with catholic school are grand. At least for the moment.

Well, there is one exception. We are two months into the the school year and yesterday Jo came home with their second all-school fundraiser. I'm praying this is not a regularly scheduled monthly affair.

In September Jo was supposed to sell magazine subscriptions. She was on crutches and the school was so brand new to us that I felt weird going around the neighborhood asking for people to buy magazines. Luckily, Jo was blabbing about prizes for selling subscriptions at the neighbor's house. So the neighbor actually came knocking on our door, saying she was meaning to renew a few subscriptions anyway and was happy to do it through our fundraiser. Thanks to our neighbor we weren't a complete failure on that one.

Now we have to sell cookie dough. I know, who doesn't love fresh out of the oven ooey-gooey cookies? But honestly, I'm not a fan of begging. It feels wrong to be constantly asking other people to buy something so a couple bucks are taken off our girls' tuition.

If there was a money tree growing in our backyard I would gladly write out a big fat check to the school with a sticky note attached: Please excuse The Glafcke's from all future fundraising campaigns.