Cute Little Bastards

We’ve always known that John was a bit of a Pixie but now we have incontrovertible proof. John started in a 2-hour per day play group program yesterday that is hosted by the City of West Palm Beach. It’s the Pixie Program. Why they choose to call it this when ‘Pixie’ is such a gender specific word I have no idea. But, who cares.

For a whopping $40 a month John now gets to visit and interact with children his age from Monday through Friday from 9:30AM to 11:30AM. They do crafts, cook, have story time, play, play at the outside park and generally do what kids do. This is not an academic program and that’s just fine with me for 3-5 year olds. So far John has LOVED it. For an additional $2 per month they have an add-on program called ‘Spry kids’ (good name this time) which teaches all the basic sports like Soccer. This happens two days per week (Wed and Fri) and is an additional 1 hour of play. It is hard to fathom what a deal this is. 2 hours per week of physical sports activity for $2 a month. That’s a quarter per hour. Wow. John’s first day in Spry Kids was today so his total session was three hours, as it will be on Friday’s. Lastly, I signed him up for a 30 minute per week Gymnastics program that is built into one of his Pixie sessions. This is run by a commercial kids Gynmastics company that comes on site and has teh kids go through the basics. At the end of April Julia will turn 3 and she’ll be eligible for the program. Yes, in just four short months I’ll win 2 hours per day of 100% adult time to work on my business and otherwise get things done (like grocery shop) that are almost too painful to deal with when you have a 2 and 4 year old in tow. Phew! I needed this.

Pat also encouraged me to check out when John will start school based on his birthday. He’ll be a late starter and will be almost 6 by the time he hits kindergarten. That’s the bad news. The good news is that Florida just passed a new law last year that provides a state sponsored 3 hour per day pre-k academic program. So John will get to do that this Fall and it won’t cost a dime. The program focuses on building basic literacy skills that will help them get a head start in kindergarten and school in general. The only hitch right now is that the schools don’t have the capacity or room to open this up across the board. The program anticipated this and provides private school funding in the amount of $2,500 per student, per annum for approved vendors so that you can do the same program at a commercial school.

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