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Every year we do it.
We go to the school "Open House" night. We drop off all the crap that will fill the kids' desks and cubbies, fill out 500,000,001 forms, write out hundreds of dollars worth of checks, and let the kids see their classrooms.
I'm not doing it anymore.
I'll tell you why.
I hate it.
I hate that there are always hundreds of people crowding the hallways. I hate the chaos. I hate the filling out of forms while my kids dance around the room getting into crap. I hate the writing out of all the checks. I hate that we have to be in three schools at one time, but none of them are close to one another and it takes at least an hour at each school. And no, we can't just "divide and conquer" because Dean doesn't "do" forms. He just doesn't.
This year I just said, "No." to school open house.
This week I have gone to my kids' schools during the day and collected the forms I need to fill out, and I brought the kids along. The halls were quiet. At midnight on September 2nd you will find me filling out those forms, and then I will put them in each kids' backpack for their teachers to find on the first day of school. And I bet if I miss something, I will get a little reminder later in the week. ;-)
This year I have paid all lunch and sports fees online.
This year I will not be dragging my post-institutional children through anxiety inducing crowds. And to be honest, I am probably more anxious than they are as I try not to loose them in said crowd.
My kids do not even realize we missed this event at their schools. I'm ok with that.
I say, good for you. We are going to O's open house this evening and I'm a bit anxious about it for some of the very same reasons you state. I am hoping he will be OK with all the noise, but who knows? We also did not meet his teacher at his IEP in May (we met the other ECSE teacher for some reason), so I'd like to have a few minutes of her time. I'm crossing my fingers that it all goes well!
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