School's in

Ella turns five this Wednesday, so she had a party on Saturday. We decided to have it at the YMCA, since Ella went to gym there and loved it, also it's miles cheaper than something like Lollipops.

Basically they just put out all the gym gear and let the kids go nuts for two hours. We brought a pile of food - Ella's cake was in the shape of a 5, with a road on it, just like she'd asked for.

All sorts of different people there, including grandparents, family friends with kids about the same age, and some school (well, daycare) friends.

Here are a few photos:

It wasn't until I tried my usual belated attempts at introducing people to other people (I mean the adults) that I realised that virtually all of them know each other already, through us. For some reason I find this interesting, given that I know a few other people this way.

You know, you always see them at someone else's place, and you do the old semi-awkward catch-up-try-to-remember-names-occupations-marriage-status thing. I'm making it sound bad, but it's not.

Also, for those that may be interested, we have finally found a school for Ella to go to, after much faffing around.

There are two schools within about 800m of our house, but one of them (Fairfield) has no after-school care whatsoever, and the other (Insoll) has it, but it finishes at 4:30, which means leaving work at about 3:45.

Woodstock is about 3km away and has after-school care until 5:30, but as it is viewed as a "good" school (I don't know what this means, maybe they don't chain the kids up or something) they will only take people from within the school zone. Guess where we don't live?

Still, they have a ballot for out-of-zone places. Luckily, Ella gained a place through this. Unluckily, there are no places available in the after-school care, and a long waiting list. Not entirely sure why they neglected to tell us this in the first place.

So, we put her name down on the waiting list, but weren't really sure what to do or how long to wait for a place to come up. We decided to go and look at Whitiora School at the last minute (phoned them from the car on Friday morning).


View Larger Map
(all five of those big blocks on the map)

They don't care about zoning, they have an after-school program with spaces (and a holiday program), and the new entrant teacher had a student teacher in, so showed Ella and Rach around the school.

So, that's where she's going. Right in the middle of the city, so not really near where we live, but it is at least on the way to work. Looks like a really nice school too.