"If Kindergarten"

Today (now yesterday) was Julien's grand debut at his bilingual, all-day Kindergarten. To clarify what "all-day" entails, the latest I'm supposed to drop him off is 8:30am and the earliest pick-up time is 5pm! Rather intense, but he sure loved it. I was so proud of him! His personality is so eager and accepting of new experiences. He waltzed right in, not minding a bit that he only knows about 5 words of Chinese, asked where he should sit and said "bye, Mom." Wish we all could have that gift!

As for this photo of Ryley with the mask: when we were leaving our apartment for the 10 minute sauna walk to school, I decided I'd better dawn a medical mask to conform to social pressures, seeing as how I'd developed a little bit of a cough these past couple of days. And of course, since it looked fun and oh so cool, Ryley did the the same :) You see, at this point I fell into one of the main categories of people who should be wearing a mask. The other category is comprised of all healthy people who are afraid they might catch some disease from other masked, or unmasked, people. This being how it is over here, at any given point you'll notice nearly half the people on the street are wearing masks. Come to think of it, there really is a third category too: scooter drivers just trying to to keep exhaust and dirt out of their mouths! Now that's understandable. Personally, as far as the other categories go, I'd much prefer the hand-washing approach to staying healthy rather than be forced to breath my suffocatingly stale, recycled air for any amount of time. After just a few minutes, somehow my mask ended up in the bottom of Theo's stroller. Ryley's stayed on. What stamina!



 Here we are approaching the gates of If Bilingual Kindergarten where Julien is enrolled in their senior class (Kindergarten is still part of the preschool system). Interesting name, interesting story of how we found this place. Once we selected our apartment during our home-finding trip, our next focus was to find a preschool that was walkable. Bilingual preschools are quite common over here (such an amazing focus on learning English at a young age), and they have anywhere from 10% to 90% of their curriculum in English. We were searching for a school with a solid 50% to still be in Chinese for Julien's benefit, but the walkable factor was also attractive for several reasons. Foremost, I knew I'd no longer be the minivan-driving-mama I once was. Logistics needed to be taken into consideration. Secondly, even though many of the big-name preschools will pick kids up in their cute little buses, but I knew it would be good for me to have a built-in routine forcing me to leave my apartment every day, as a safe-guard against those dark, reclusion tendencies I get when depression clouds start to hang low. The other very attractive aspect of walking Julien to school was the face-to-face interactions we'd have with other parents and kids. We really want to make friends over here and hoped our pathetically eager smiles would communicate that :) 

So during our home-finding trip, our quest to find a good preschool within a short distance was communicated to Andy and he said, "no problem." He drove us across the main boulevard and around the block in a little neighborhood and there was a whole line of preschools. Seriously, at least four in a row! We parked the car and started knocking on doors seeing if any of them had openings. No go, another no go, smoking man in wife-beater shirt said there was room at their most wonderful preschool (i.e. no go), and then finally we arrived at If Kindergarten and were greeted by this young lady in the photo with Julien. Joanne's English was impeccable, she was professional, organized, and very warm and caring. She said that they had never had a foreign student before but would love to have Julien join their small school (they just have one class of 22 students in each grade) and there happened to be 2 spots left in their "puppy" class which was the senior/ Kindergarten equivalent class. Yay! Again we felt so incredibly blessed and recognized another answer to our prayers.

The name may seem a bit odd at first, but it's actually based on a poem they have displayed in their lobby: it's something very endearing, inspirational, and grammatically correct about if you let a child learn and explore, etc. then they will blossom and grow (or something to that effect). Very nice. And after awhile that dangling conjunction [If] seems like the best possible name for a good preschool :)

Here you see its playground. We knew Julien would go nuts over that climbing dinosaur! We were right.

After Julien said goodbye to me (a.k.a. shooing his mother away), Ryley had the lovely idea of stopping by 7-Eleven for an early morning slurpee. And look at that, there just so happened to be one at the end of the street!









This is the best stretch of sidewalk that we have on our trek to Julien's school. It lasts for at least 4 store fronts and has minimal gradient changes from shop to shop. And look at those considerate scooters who chose to not park all the way up to the wall. Taiwanese sidewalks and strollers really don't get along. Most of the way we find ourselves on the street edge competing with the scooters for road shoulder rights.










The tall, skinny building on the left is what an individual residence looks like in Taichung. They are basically a super narrow town-home with a garage on ground level and rooms 3 or 4 stories stacked. We're grateful to have been given the apartment option. You can see our crazy tall apartment building in the background--the one with the blue, tan and white stripes.










This photo captures what it was like to have Julien's energy (shall we mention the naughtiness factor too?) gone to school all day. In the quite hours of Theo's nap, Ryley took up sewing buttons on dried baby wipes with my travel sewing kit. His new-found skills turned into a project he wanted to make as a surprise for Julien: a sewn coat for Julien's stuffed animal, Puppy, to wear. This quiet, focused endeavor lasted for almost 2 hours. How lovely it was!

I was a little bit eager to pick Julien up and make sure everything went o.k. on his first day. He came into the school lobby with bright eyes and a smile and reported that he loved it :)


As a reward for braving his first day at school in Taiwan, he got to have a "motor tub bath!"