Well, its that time of year again where kids everywhere flock back to school. The clothes are purchased, the school supplies are bountiful and the nervous excitement comes over them as they begin to wrap their minds around another year of school. “What will my teachers be like? Will I be in classes with my friends? What pretty girl or good looking boy will I meet?” For my son Noah, its just a little different than that. He will be entering a new school district where he doesn’t know any of the kids. The apprehension was running high for him over the last few days because of a mix up in where he thought he would be attending. We live in the village of Los Lunas, and just assumed that he would be attending the Los Lunas Middle School, so my husband took him down to register him there. Noah was very impressed with the school and was truly excited and looking forward to going there. Then bad news struck from across the street. We live across the street from a retired sheriff who actually works at the school Noah should have been signed up for. My neighbor started talking about the school and filling Noah in on the kinds of kids that attend, but Noah had his heart set on going to the other middle school. Nothing would snap him out of the bad news. He had visions of some back woods school where guns and knives were the norm I think. Yesterday I had to take him to the “other” middle school and he was dreading it the whole drive. I found the address of the school, and that is where the odyssey of actually reaching the destination began! Google driving directions let me down big time as drove in circles around the same area thinking that I must have left out a street or something like that. We were driving for well over an hour, asking random people if they knew where the school was…to no avail. We called the school for directions, yet the directions they gave were not helpful at all, especially since all the major street signs out on the mesa were non-existent. Driving down long stretches of road in the desert, turning around and going in another direction was just making me nuts! Finally we pull into an elementary school and decide to ask there for directions. Did we get proper directions from this elementary school? NO! Finally a parent in the school was able to give us the actual directions. The middle school wasn’t close like others had said…nope, it was more than six miles away in a direction that we would have never gone.
We got to the school, and I was impressed with the school staff, the building and also what they had to offer Noah in terms of being in the gifted and talented program. I truly think that he had visions of being in some hot trailer out on the mesa somewhere near a shanty town of some sort. Not true. It was a very nice school.
As I write this, Noah is busy getting ready to go. Today will be an “off day” for him and many other new students who will be sitting in the guidance counselor’s office awaiting their schedule. Noah’s biggest fear was being in classes that don’t challenge him since he is an advanced student, excelling in every class he takes. The guidance counselor was able to relieve those fears when she told him that she would place him in pre-AP courses. I know that he felt better about that.
I’ll miss having him here during the day! He is such a great kid. While many parents celebrate the first day of school because their kids drove them crazy all summer, I’ll be singing a dirge.
*just a little side note…
In the pictures I posted of Noah, you can see all the big ass green tumble weeds. He and my husband have been busy removing all of them. Tumble weeds set seed with their prickly seed getting into everything. As those seeds fall to the ground, we pick them up on the bottom of our shoes and actually end up tracking them into the house! If you’ve never had one of these things stuck in your foot, I can liken it to stepping on a sharp tack! The secret is to remove them before they set seed, and hopefully each year the amount of tumble weeds decrease.
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