Day +1053: Kindergarten blues
Hello everyone, it's been a long time since the last update. This is a busy time of year for me as I get my fantasy baseball website ready for the year, so that's part of the reason. Also just a case of Spring Fever, I guess. Things are going fine here. The two airplane trips obviously made a big impression on Isaac, because it's been all about airplanes ever since we got home. As soon as they got back he started using his saxophone as an airplane, having it take off and land on our living room carpet which is the runway. He's also very interested in the jetway, which for some reason he can't stop calling the "chiefway". He was using a book as the "chiefway" and driving it over to the "plane" so the passengers could get off. They got to go into the cockpit as they boarded the plane for their trip home, so that obviously made a big impression. He has to push a lot of buttons to make the plane take off and land. It's all very cute, and kind of nice to see him absorbed in something. There is a flight museum somewhere on the Peninsula that I'll take him to one of these days. Apparently there is a lot of airplane equipment that kids can play with, including a real cockpit.
A couple of other funny stories about Isaac. The first one requires some setup. We have these soft wool undershirts for the kids that Keri really likes the kids to wear. She's always telling them how important it is to wear wool, which is really true in San Francisco where it's pretty cold most of the year. The kids must think wool is some kind of a magic substnace, because the other day as Isaac was running by the dining room table he caught his foot and did a hard face plant onto the wood floor. He got himself up in a hurry and glanced around with kind of a stunned look on his face. Then he said "Good thing I'm wearing wool!" and then he took off running down the hall again.
Keri was cleaning up the living room the other day and looking for things to get rid of to try to declutter our little flat. She asked Isaac if he wanted to give anything away, and he went to his basket and picked out some of his baby instruments, rattles and shakers, and wanted to give those away so a baby could use them. Another thing that I find funny is this little game that he and Mina have going around their vitamins that they get every morning. Mina is very particular about her colors; she always wants red or orange (there are no pink vitamins). I have a strict rule that they get whatever comes out of the jar (I don't want to have to eat all of the green and yellow vitamins myself), but I allow them to swap. So when Isaac gets the red one he usually gives it to Mina, and he always says "I like every color and every thing!" That's become one of his catch phrases, and it's quite endearing when he just say "I love every color and every one" out of the blue.
Last Isaac story: we spent Friday evening with Melissa and Bliss (Casey and Austin were out of town for the weekend), and Melissa asked Isaac if he wanted to help her make little English muffin pizzas. He was so thrilled, Keri had to call me to tell me about it as I was on my way up there. He put some sauce on the muffins and grated all of the cheese, and did a couple of other things too. Keri said he was at least three inches taller when everything was finally in the oven and he was done helping.
Mina Brigitta continues to thrive as we approach the third anniversary of her transplant. Number 3 is a big one. It doesn't mean that the cancer can never return (no anniversary will ever mean that, unfortunately), but the doctors consider it a very significant landmark for long-term survival when dealing with an aggressive cancer like AML. It's now a little more than a month away. We're planning to it by spending the weekend in the Russian River area as we've done the last two years. Mina is a very sweet girl who loves her friends and her family very intensely. She is constantly making cards for her best Anika, and the other day she wrapped up one of her babies for Anika in some of our old Christmas wrapping paper. She loves animals of all kinds and really REALLY wants a pet. The other day she brought home a worm from the park. She held it in her hand while they drove home, but she fell asleep in the car so they put it by the tree on our front sidewalk. Once she saw a spider on the ceiling and said "what's that creature?" Luckily she understands that we really do have to kill the ants that keep coming into our kitchen. But she is constantly stopping people on the sidewalk to say hello to their dogs. She is not in the least bit shy, she walks right up to them and says "What's your doggie's name? My name's Mina!"
The only medical news we have is that Mina visited the eye doctor last week and it does not look like her cataracts are progressing at this point. No guarantee that they won't progress at some point in the future, but it's good that they are stable now and that they caught the problem early.
The other big thing that's going on right now is trying to place Mina in a kindergarten for next year. Keri has been working very hard on this, visiting lots of schools and gathering all kinds of information. We always knew it was going to be a challenge trying to get the kids into good schools in San Francisco, but it's been an adventure to say the least. San Francisco has school choice, to an extent. You list your top seven programs, and the district tries to place you in one of them. Geographic proximity is a factor, but not the primary one. If a school has more than one program, e.g., a language immersion program and a general ed program, each counts as a separare choice. There are some excellent schools in San Francisco, but as you can imagine with this kind of a system, there is way more demand for those schools than they can accommodate. Apparently 82% of families got one of their seven choices, but we were among the lucky 18% who didn't, even though one of our choices was the school that is a block away from our house!
Instead, Mina got placed in the Rosa Parks school, which is in kind of a dodgy neighborhood in the Western Addition near some housing projects. But when Keri visited the school, she actually liked it a lot. The school is near the old Japantown (mostly empty since WWII when all of the Japanese-Americans were sent to internment camps), and they have a Japanese bilingual program that Keri really liked. Unfortunately that is a separate program, and to enroll Mina in it we have to go back through the school district lottery. There is another lottery drawing in a few weeks, and then there is a wait list period after than, and some kids don't end up in their final schools until the first week of school in the fall. So there is lots of drama left to happen, and we may not know for a long time whether Mina will get into an acceptable school. We'll keep you posted.
A couple of other funny stories about Isaac. The first one requires some setup. We have these soft wool undershirts for the kids that Keri really likes the kids to wear. She's always telling them how important it is to wear wool, which is really true in San Francisco where it's pretty cold most of the year. The kids must think wool is some kind of a magic substnace, because the other day as Isaac was running by the dining room table he caught his foot and did a hard face plant onto the wood floor. He got himself up in a hurry and glanced around with kind of a stunned look on his face. Then he said "Good thing I'm wearing wool!" and then he took off running down the hall again.
Keri was cleaning up the living room the other day and looking for things to get rid of to try to declutter our little flat. She asked Isaac if he wanted to give anything away, and he went to his basket and picked out some of his baby instruments, rattles and shakers, and wanted to give those away so a baby could use them. Another thing that I find funny is this little game that he and Mina have going around their vitamins that they get every morning. Mina is very particular about her colors; she always wants red or orange (there are no pink vitamins). I have a strict rule that they get whatever comes out of the jar (I don't want to have to eat all of the green and yellow vitamins myself), but I allow them to swap. So when Isaac gets the red one he usually gives it to Mina, and he always says "I like every color and every thing!" That's become one of his catch phrases, and it's quite endearing when he just say "I love every color and every one" out of the blue.
Last Isaac story: we spent Friday evening with Melissa and Bliss (Casey and Austin were out of town for the weekend), and Melissa asked Isaac if he wanted to help her make little English muffin pizzas. He was so thrilled, Keri had to call me to tell me about it as I was on my way up there. He put some sauce on the muffins and grated all of the cheese, and did a couple of other things too. Keri said he was at least three inches taller when everything was finally in the oven and he was done helping.
Mina Brigitta continues to thrive as we approach the third anniversary of her transplant. Number 3 is a big one. It doesn't mean that the cancer can never return (no anniversary will ever mean that, unfortunately), but the doctors consider it a very significant landmark for long-term survival when dealing with an aggressive cancer like AML. It's now a little more than a month away. We're planning to it by spending the weekend in the Russian River area as we've done the last two years. Mina is a very sweet girl who loves her friends and her family very intensely. She is constantly making cards for her best Anika, and the other day she wrapped up one of her babies for Anika in some of our old Christmas wrapping paper. She loves animals of all kinds and really REALLY wants a pet. The other day she brought home a worm from the park. She held it in her hand while they drove home, but she fell asleep in the car so they put it by the tree on our front sidewalk. Once she saw a spider on the ceiling and said "what's that creature?" Luckily she understands that we really do have to kill the ants that keep coming into our kitchen. But she is constantly stopping people on the sidewalk to say hello to their dogs. She is not in the least bit shy, she walks right up to them and says "What's your doggie's name? My name's Mina!"
The only medical news we have is that Mina visited the eye doctor last week and it does not look like her cataracts are progressing at this point. No guarantee that they won't progress at some point in the future, but it's good that they are stable now and that they caught the problem early.
The other big thing that's going on right now is trying to place Mina in a kindergarten for next year. Keri has been working very hard on this, visiting lots of schools and gathering all kinds of information. We always knew it was going to be a challenge trying to get the kids into good schools in San Francisco, but it's been an adventure to say the least. San Francisco has school choice, to an extent. You list your top seven programs, and the district tries to place you in one of them. Geographic proximity is a factor, but not the primary one. If a school has more than one program, e.g., a language immersion program and a general ed program, each counts as a separare choice. There are some excellent schools in San Francisco, but as you can imagine with this kind of a system, there is way more demand for those schools than they can accommodate. Apparently 82% of families got one of their seven choices, but we were among the lucky 18% who didn't, even though one of our choices was the school that is a block away from our house!
Instead, Mina got placed in the Rosa Parks school, which is in kind of a dodgy neighborhood in the Western Addition near some housing projects. But when Keri visited the school, she actually liked it a lot. The school is near the old Japantown (mostly empty since WWII when all of the Japanese-Americans were sent to internment camps), and they have a Japanese bilingual program that Keri really liked. Unfortunately that is a separate program, and to enroll Mina in it we have to go back through the school district lottery. There is another lottery drawing in a few weeks, and then there is a wait list period after than, and some kids don't end up in their final schools until the first week of school in the fall. So there is lots of drama left to happen, and we may not know for a long time whether Mina will get into an acceptable school. We'll keep you posted.
posted by Arne Olson @ 9:36 PM
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