First Days of School

This past Wednesday and Thursday were Connor & Elise's first days at their two school programs!  On Wednesday (the charter school) I was afraid Elise would be clingy and shy, but she was totally into it.  I think it helped that Connor was with her, plus she's been there so many times for his events and meetings, it was pretty familiar.  When I picked them up I asked her how she liked kindergarten, and she said, "It was so, so, so, so, so, so, so good!"
   

  
The Thursday program is a private school that offers a homeschool program once a week.  It has changed so much!  Last year there were only six boys, coming from four different families.  It was still great, but I was hoping there would be at least one girl enrolled this fall for Elise to play with.  Instead, there are now around 25 students, ranging from kinder to eighth grade!  Elise is in a separate K-1 classroom that includes four other kindergarten girls.  Connor is in the 2-4 class, and there is a 5-8 class, too.  I'm totally excited.  It just shows that there is a demand for this sort of thing.  A lot of parents want more flexibility and family time for their kids, but don't want to completely abandon the school environment.  Hopefully this means the program will be around awhile!
  

I love school uniforms.  Especially on little girls!

  
This Saturday we finally bit the bullet and paid somebody to trim our oak tree.  The guy who came out also offered to do a yard clean-up, so we had them clear the hillsides (technically it's required for fire safety reasons), and remove some of the ivy on our front slope.  I was happy with the ivy killing, since I want to get rid of all of it eventually.  Unfortunately, the hillside "brush removal" involved weed-eating everything bare.  I kinda liked some of the wildflowers and grasses and stuff - now it just looks sad.  The tree had mixed results.  It does look better, but they went a bit overboard and removed about 80% of the leaves.  It looks almost as naked as the hillside.  I'm no expert, though.  Maybe it will grow back within a few weeks and we'll be glad they went as far as they did.  Eventually we want to landscape everything with California natives, but we still don't know what we're doing, so it will have to wait.
  

  

It almost looks like somebody lives here now.