Bumped into a friend I haven't seen in over 20 years from Highschool yesterday who still lives in the area of where we went to school and I didn't realize the problem was much bigger than I knew. Catchment is Churchill and she says they're full and it's on a lottery system now, so is Hamber, and a lot of neighboring schools and the closest option to get in for sure is John Oliver like wtf you live in Marpole and you need to go to JO that's some wild stuff right there. I Suppose I shouldn't be surprised though you introduce so much Multi Family dwellings into an entire neighborhood with no new schools and this is what happens.

Am I a bad parent, or do these little guys have a propensity to get themselves or each other killed at the tiniest opportunity?

Saturday, we were at the park. I look down for a second and the older one runs over the 15m old with his bike. The 15m old's head hit the concrete ground and gets a nosebleed. ER visit.
At least we learned, you can't get a nosebleed from head trauma unless it's extreme. The doctor said there's about 3 layers before a brain trauma would come out of your nose. We are talking 100kmh+ car accidents.

Sunday. The older one again, he was playing on my sim seat and somehow managed to fall off and smack his face(read: lips and teeth) on the stone window ledge. Lots of blood. Emergency dentist visit and we need to monitor right now. He may potentially lose another tooth (he lost one at 2yo already).
Learned the hard way last night that Google is full of shit again. I went out to get yogurt so he can eat soft and easy things. It tells me Walmart and Safeway were open till 11pm. They were fucking not. Only Superstore is opened till 11pm nowadays.

That on top of the whole BS about not getting into kindergarten at his home school.... Fuck me this parenting business is rough.

Catchment can be wild.

Getting my daughter into Buckingham took luck and persistence, challenging because it is 1 class per grade, so it is an extremetly small school.

We didn't get in at first, was on waitlist (wouldnt tell which spot though), but I guess I am the parent who called/emailed daily, just enough to be on the verge of being annoying.

I remember dropping by daughter off for the first time and the office reception said.. OMG you are XXXXX's dad right? I recognize your voice... I was like... errr @___@

Though once you have your foot in the door, I remember when it was my son's turn to sign up, there was specifically a place on the form that asked if you had siblings in the school. I guess even the school understands that they don't expect the parents to drop off 2 kids at 2 different schools. So my son got in uneventfully.

Having said that, our principle visited our house once out of the blue when my daughter first got into KG. Literally told my wife straight up that there are alot of complains about "out of catchment families" that she has taken upon herself to visit each family, also giving her the opportunity to connect with the familes on a personal level.

I guess because there was only like 25 families to visit each year... it kinda works for a smaller school like Buckingham.

I'm assuming Walmart on Grandview? They sure as shit are supposed to close at 1qpm must be new because their own website still days 11. Sure enough though for Safeway google does say 11 but their website says 10. I usually just hit TnT in Richmond if need stuff late since they close at 12 and I cross the bridge to hit the gym around 11 anyway.

Google is worthless for store hours now. Recently it's sent me to 2 stores that were closed and a gas station that had been bulldozed lol.

ngl this slaps

^ I don't know whether it laugh or cry at that.

Grandparents visited from out of country for 20 days and stayed with us...ruined everything.

Oh do tell, this is a safe place

Their, there, they're, it'll be alright. They won't be around forever. :concentrate:

Shxt I'm sorry to hear about the little ones banging themselves / the other up. I hope they'll recover quickly.

I remember my little person falling off the bed / sofa on multiple occasions, and it was scary to watch.

Haha just the typical never saying no to anything, directly going against what we (as parents to the kid) asked for, etc.

I mean it was still a great time and the kid connected well with the grandparents, it's just us now trying to unravel weeks of bad habits and pushed boundaries lol. FML when they came home with a half-eaten bag of cotton candy.

Don't worry, feel free to spoil your future grandkids (if any)! :troll:

:bowdown:

Waverley! That's where I spent my primary years. Back then, I only knew of Canto and didn't know Mandarin was a thing except oranges :noyoudidnt:

But running into the kids from Killarney, Kingsford and Corpus 'Crispy' as I used to call it, the ones from Killarney always seemed different as if there was something in the water or the air (other than asbestos).

Of all my cousins who went there (6), only 1 went on to lead a good life. I definitely blame Killarney :troll:

My MIL is back again and she's all like "hey, how come this baby is literally growling at me? And he's saying stuff with some weirdo menacing batman voice!"

Uhh... because you taught him to? Every day that you were here last time, for a whole month, you growled and screeched at him til he laughed and did it back to you. Every damn day.

"Oh really? Well it's very odd. Babies shouldn't make noises like that."

As 12mo kiddo takes a big sip of his water and spurts it across the kitchen. Grandma laughs and makes a big show of egging him on.

Oh and every time the baby protests when he doesn't want to sleep, and struggles with us when we change his diaper, "HE DOESN'T WANT IT. HE DOESN'T WANT IT." No shit. Hey, you sure you've done this before?? Were you like, an absentee parent?

My dad just came up and triggered the whole family today (for context, my parents live in my basement). After dinner I was taking out the trash and my dad just walked in the back door. He picks up one of the kids, which causes the other one to be jealous, and then triggers them to start crying.... I'm like fuck me they were playing fine before that.......

So my kid went to his best friend's place after school.

When it was time for me to go pick them up, both kids were in the best friend's room playing. Before I walked in, I had called out for my kid's name, so they knew I was coming.

When I got into the room, I saw both kids holding on to a Pocky (stick) in their little hands the way smokers would hold a cigarette. Then right in front of my eyes, my kid brought the Pocky stick into his mouth and acted like he was smoking a cigarette.

I honestly think I was the one that has been traumatized...

In a plain voice tone, I ask my kid what he/they were doing, and he told me they were "play smoking".

I tried to keep a straight face, but in my mind, I was already having the biggest eye rolling I can imagine.

Me: Smoking is not good for your health, so we don't smoke, OK?
Kid: OK! We aren't really smoking anyway. We were just play smoking.
Me: Baba don't want to see you play smoking either.
Kid: OK! I will just suck on the Pocky then!

I probably muttered something else too, but by then, I honestly didn't really know what would be the best course of action to proceed.

I have a gazillion questions about how I should approach this, and one question that I feel like I would need to decide on is -- should I tell the best friend kid's parents about their behaviour as well? None of us smoke.

I already had a brief discussion about this with my wife, and we are both not sure how we should approach this. For now, I am tempted to treat this as "just play" since the kids are really still only in non-senior grades in elementary school. But as I was saying earlier, I was at least somewhat traumatized since smoking / play smoking is the last thing I would have expected to see my kid to.

If this one data point helps at all, I remember play-smoking all the time in elementary school. And I didn't wind up smoking.

At least he felt safe and comfortable not to have to hide anything from you. That seems positive!

I will fully admit this as well -- back when I was a kid, there was this cigarette chocolate stick where the packaging literally resembled a pack of cigarettes, and each chocolate stick was individually paper-wrapped to look like a cigarette, with a shorter brown coloured section resembling the filter part, and a longer white part resembling the tobacco leafs section too. I totally played a ton of play smoking with those as well, and I never had any interest in smoking real cigarettes throughout my life.

Of course, that was a time when it was far more socially acceptable to be smoking -- all the Formula 1 teams were sponsored by tobacco companies -- Marlboro, Camel, Rothmans Williams, Mild Seven, etc.

I used to "smoke" these all the time as a kid. What a time.

https://candyfunhouse.com/cdn/shop/p...g?v=1686239301

We played smoke when we were a kid, my parents even bought chocolate cigars for us.

-------

On an unrelated and more serious topic, and also a bit of mind dump so I gather my thoughts.

We thought we were done with the stress of kindergarten entry, but we just had a curve ball thrown at us. We have a spot at Corpus Christi. There's some stipulations involved such as having to attend their bible studies at night once a week. Being a part of the student body means there's a mandatory number of volunteer hours with the school per school year, and there are mandatory extra curricular events. There's a lot of unpack and we are still trying to figure it out.

One of the kids at my son's daycare went to Corpus for kindergarten this year. The little brother is still at daycare and I bumped into the mom at pick up yesterday and had a good chat with her about it. She's been happy about it but noted that some parents find the commitment challenging. Having your kids attend there would mean burning a lot of vacation days for various things.

Pros:
- One of the most highly rated schools academically, they do extremely well and are well regarded
- The mom noted that they do have some great trips - they went to a salmon hatchery this year and the kids helped release the frys.
- The parents are typically going to be more engaged and pay more attention to their children's education and behaviour
- The mom mentioned that they had flash cards for homework, really just reading them - that implies that the school has resources to give 40 kids flash cards (2 kindergarten classes) or that they aren't afraid to draw on parents to buy extra personal supplies/resources vs public school where asking parent's to buy things is kind of taboo
- Closer to home than Champlain Heights
- Uniformed - some parents might think it's annoying, but I like that it takes the guesswork out of dressing the kids for 8 years.
- Volunteering - some parents might have an issue with the time commitment, but we actually think it would be beneficial for our son with his personality, for us to be involved through the school
- There would be no special needs kids - this sounds absolutely terrible in the current PC world, but DDA is a non-profit that works with special needs. The first year at his daycare every kid was "normal", but this year there's two special needs kids in his class. I am super happy for them that they found childcare because most daycares do not accept special needs kids, but it's been disruptive to the class. Despite having extra dedicated caretakers I can tell the teachers are very frazzled and less attentive with the regular kids due to the special needs.

Cons:
- Tuition - we aren't exactly in the best financial place to commit to 8 + 8 years of tuition. They have 3 tiers of tuition, $400, $600, $1000 for their own members, for members of other catholic orgs, and non-believers. We are trying to figure out which tier we would fall into if we are to have to join their bible study. We have two kids, so in 3 years we would be paying for 2 kids tuition per month. Their daycare is currently $10/d so $200/m each.
- Transition - My son is currently at Champlain Child Care with DDA. They run a system that's very open ended, which imo is a good step up to public school. CC seems much more structured and I don't know how well my son is going to transition. He had a hard time transitioning from his old daycare to Champlain because it went from a very structured setting to one that's not.
- The more.... forced is too strong of a word, but more applied academics - my son is super curious and has picked up addition and subtraction, and starting to pick up reading on his own. We have found that forcing him to learn things typically would backfire. Though he's also more receptive of others teaching vs us. This is a bit of a conundrum because we can tell he's bored at the things at daycare and longs for a challenge, yet we feel it's a challenge he needs to pick and choose.
- Extra curricular stuff - because it's Catholic, there are mandatory out of school things you have to be a part of for Easter and Christmas, that I know of.
- Rules and expectations, for the parents more than for the kids. I have no way to know at this point, but I would think CC would be more uptight about parents being on time for pick up and drop off. Somehow I also feel like they'd be frowning upon me dropping off in a visually and aurally loud M3 rather than say, a gray Rav4 or something.

Neutral things:
- We are concerned about fit with the teachers, but really it's not something we can gauge until he actually starts school, so it's an empty concern.
- He doesn't have friends have either schools - we don't know ppl. The kid that already goes to CC, my son didn't play with, plus he's a year ahead anyways.
- Champlain is known to be a good school, very nature oriented which we like, but it seems like CC is not all sit down and read and write either. So I don't know which one is better.

Anyways mind dump complete for now. Processing this last night combined with the little one being awake from 1-4am. I'm kind of exhausted right now.

Thanks for the previews into fatherhood over the next couple years from where we're at. This post, and your last one re physical accidents, that is some real shiet. Sounds like the challenges will keep evolving.

So, continuing on the dark side of parenthood, lol.

We recently started trying again after 2 miscarriages in a span of a year or so. The first one was very early, I think <6 weeks or so, and we kinda knew early on because at the first blood test the hCG levels were too low. Some cramping, minor bleeding, although the wife took it hard mentally because she was excited for the second.

The second one was farther in, maybe 2 months or so, and we again found that while the hCG levels were high, it wasn't going up as normal. She ended up doing like 5 blood tests in 2 weeks or so, and doctor told us to prepare for the inevitable. This one was bad, bad cramps for days and then suddenly everything...left her body. 0/10. Mentally she already kinda experienced loss and throughout the process of blood tests and what not she was kind of preparing for it as a possibility I guess.

Anyway speaking to a few close people about it seems like almost everyone had an experience (or a few); someone lost theirs at 30 weeks, and they stopped trying altogether, and just have one kid. It's admittedly something nobody wants to talk about, but I guess it's a lot more prevalent on the down-low.

One thing I will say though, the experience made me hyper-sensitive to people (especially older people) asking why we don't have a second. Before I'd just laugh it off and say something like oh we're trying - now I either tell them to fuck off (politely) or just blatantly tell them we've lost 2, and they shut up pretty quickly after that.

Hug your kids, they are the product of a trillion different things all going well; literally one misstep in the entire process and they wouldn't be here.

I think the stat is something like at least 25% of women have had at least one miscarriage. It's terrible to deal with and nobody seems to talk about how common it is which imo makes it even worse when someone is going through it.

Long story short my wife miscarried when we were trying for our second as well. Pretty sure I shared the story of her dumbass coworker asking if she was pregnant the day after she had to suddenly run home in the middle of the day. Going through the process of having kids makes you realize how much people need to shut the fuck up when it comes to other people's pregnancy. Between infertility, miscarriages, etc nobody should ever be asking when someone is having a kid/having more/if they're pregnant.