Little Kids, Big City: Tales from a Real House in New York City (With Lessons on Life and Love for Your Own Concrete Jungle) (20 page)

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Authors: Alex McCord,Simon van Kempen

BOOK: Little Kids, Big City: Tales from a Real House in New York City (With Lessons on Life and Love for Your Own Concrete Jungle)
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Sleeplessness is a recurring theme throughout parenthood and it rears its ugly head again a few years later. Once you get past the baby phase and blast through the motor skill development phase, the chanting in Arabic phase (OK, I made that one up), you eventually get to the “applying to school phase,” which is where all urban parents turn into wailing, nocturnal, type-A obsessed harridans willing to sleep with persons not their spouse if they think it will help their child get into THE RIGHT SCHOOL. Although we resisted stressing out too much, we endured this process as well. I am absolutely beyond elated that Johan was accepted to the pre-K program at François’ elementary school. No, this was not a private school where interviews, application fees and recommendations changed hands in hopes of being awarded the privilege of paying $30,000 per year per child for a junior kindergarten program. The finger-drumming, obsessive refreshing of the “check e-mail” button and backup-plan plotting was over a spot in a public school. People think New Yorkers and other urban dwellers are crazy. Trust me, we’re not.
We bought our townhouse in the zone of one of the best elementary school districts in the city, which I’ll call PS Fabulous. We knew how difficult the private school application process was, particularly for parents like us with no family connections to any particular school. We wanted to be sure that if we were unable to place our boys in private school right away, that they would have a great public school alternative. Aren’t we so smart and prepared? Ha! It turns out that there are so many hundreds of children in our school zone, which is only a few square blocks, that a lottery is necessary for those valuable 54 places in pre-K. Our first year after François had been wait-listed at both the private schools to which we’d applied, we entered the pre-K lottery at PS Fab. François’ name was drawn at number 10 on the wait list, which at the time may as well have been number 650. He hadn’t gotten in, and we were crushed. It had nothing to do with his abilities or test scores, but just the luck of the draw. Simon attended the drawing and phoned me immediately at the office once he’d found out. In anticipation of the F-Bomb being wait-listed, I was standing by from work with a spreadsheet of nearby schools with pre-K programs, and the phone number of our zone’s district office within the Board of Education. After a quick call, I narrowed down the list to schools without lotteries and that brought the list down to one. Only one school was kinda sorta within walking distance, had a pre-K program and no lottery. It was near a housing project, and was an integration school where students with high-functioning disabilities were mixed with the class. We decided on both counts that it would bring diversity to the classroom, and in the case of the latter, help teach François tolerance at a young age. It wasn’t a done deal; I called “PS Just OK” and they said that parents were already calling for spots. I convinced them to hold onto one for François since we’d called before any parents who might walk in later that day, and promised that Simon or I would walk his file over to the school within 24 hours.
After moving into the neighborhood specifically for PS Fab, we were heartbroken and angry that we couldn’t get in and had to take François further away to PS Just OK in the next zone. Far from the urban flight of the past few decades, people haven’t been moving to the suburbs once kid number one or even number two comes along. They, like us, admit their addiction to the urban environment. Does needing to live within one block of an all-night oyster bar mean you have to sacrifice your kids’ education? That’s where the “Me” generation morphs into the “We” (no, not the Wii—we haven’t gotten there yet). We couldn’t believe that there were so many kids in a few square blocks that our neighborhood school couldn’t take them all, and the school we were able to enroll François in was only four long blocks away but might as well have been on Mars in terms of the composition. In Brooklyn we say “long blocks and short blocks” like Manhattanites say “avenue blocks and street blocks.”
As the last few years of our lives have been well-documented thanks to our reality show experience, sometimes time lines get blurred and viewers think that something which happened six months or a year ago happened yesterday. Predictably, this happened with something very close to our hearts—school enrollment. We went through the drama of PS Fab versus PS OK while we filmed season one of
Housewives
. Simon was angry and frustrated the day he spoke on camera about our son only getting into what he sarcastically called our 14th choice school. A couple of weeks later we nearly started levitating in excitement when we received a call that a seat had opened up at PS Fab, and immediately switched François over. The following year when the show aired, some parents watched and thought that we were insulting PS Fab, which we weren’t. A quick conversation with the principal, his teacher and the class parents cleared that up, and we happily settled into the rhythm of his new school. Two years later, we went through the same nerve-racking process to place Johan at PS Fab. Although there is an enrolled family priority policy, there was a question as to whether there would be more than 54 siblings applying to pre-K. I know—it’s crazy. The fact that there are potentially 54 four-year-olds with older brothers and sisters in one particular school, all in a few short blocks, is kind of mind-blowing. That’s New York, my friends.
 
Simon
Since mid-2005 (before François’ second birthday), Alex and I started on the hunt for the right school for him. When we’d moved to Park Slope, Brooklyn from the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 2001, despite not having children at that time, we had ensured that we bought a co-op in one of the best elementary school zones in Brooklyn: PS321. At that stage the choice was as much for maintaining good property values than anything else. When we decided that our three-bedroom co-op was going to be too small for a family of four about to take on a live-in au pair and started our new house search, at the top of our list was to be within a great school zone. Yes, we wanted to go the private route, but perhaps it’s my caution gained from losing my father at such a young age, that I know too well how quickly life can change. It is always best to be as prepared as possible. One thing I wasn’t prepared for was the very young age that schooling can start these days. I remember my mother being very proud that I was allowed to start school at four years, nine months, and how my then early admission was only down to the fact that a few months earlier I’d beaten the headmaster’s 12-year-old son at poker. But there’s a huge difference from being almost five and going off to school than with François, who started a three-days a week program before his third birthday and five full days of school before his fourth. Likewise, Johan started four days a week before his third birthday and in the fall of 2009 joined his big brother at a full five days a week of schooling.
 
Johan Graduates Preschool!
 
Yes, I know there are those that say that schooling for two-, three- and even four-year-olds is just expensive day care and the best children can benefit is learning some sharing skills and dealing with peers. Until this experience I would have been fairly sympathetic to that viewpoint. But having watched the development of my sons, attended Parent-Teacher Nights to discuss the curriculum and how they were finding it and seeing exactly what they have learned, it
is
very different than daycare and they have learned a lot more than I did at a comparable age. In September 2009 François entered his fourth year of schooling still at the ripe old of age of five. Wow!
 
Alex
François started school a whole two years before I did. Back before all the drama of PS Fab, PS Just OK and sleepless nights, we had our first round of craziness in the name of education with preschool. When F-Bomb was not quite three, we had just been through the first round of private preschool applications, and he had been wait-listed everywhere. We kept in contact with the director of admissions at our top choice and spoke to her every month or so. It was she who remembered that she’d just heard of a new preschool that had a drop-out situation and had one opening for a three-year-old boy. Simon jumped off the phone with her, called me and I immediately called the school. I raced over with a checkbook and filled out an application on the spot. François had a great year there, and we were thrilled that two years later when it came time to apply for Johan, he was considered a sibling legacy. It didn’t hit me until I heard other parents obsessing over whether they’d heard back from our school that we were very lucky that the J-Boy was a legacy. Johan, like his brother, spent his year doing art studies on Pollock, Miro and Van Gogh, watched caterpillars turn into butterflies, made more than one shark puppet and proudly brought home a potted marigold for Mother’s Day. With so many school choices in the city, do you have to pick one school for all kids in your family? Not necessarily, but it helps. At the preschool level, I firmly believe that one school is as good as another for both kids, even though they have their differences. One thing I heartily recommend is choosing a school that’s as close to your home as possible. I still can’t believe we applied to a preschool on the Upper West Side of Manhattan the first year. We’d have been killing ourselves and each other by the end of the year. Early childhood development and feeder schools be damned. I really, truly believe that where you went to preschool simply does not matter when it comes time to apply to Northwestern or Yale. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Throughout the entire school application process, there have been many, many interviews. Interviews with parents. Interviews with children. Interviews with caregivers. Normally schools don’t interview the babysitter, but during an interview with one of the boys, I came out to find an admissions associate chatting away with our nanny about his motor skills. There are playgroups with 10 children where the kids engage in “observed free play” while the teachers take notes in the corner and the parents pace the hallway outside in a controlled panic. All those interviews were to determine whether or not the boys were accepted to school, but even once we got into PS Fab, there were still interviews to be endured. The class grouping interview was new for our family with Johan, since François entered PS Fab after the year had started and went into the only class that had a space. Our J-Boy was accepted to school and asked to turn up at an intake interview. I’m guessing that with multiple classrooms they didn’t want all the rambunctious kids or the kids who needed extra help or the kids with irritating parents all in one class. During his interview Johan was calm, cool, collected and absolutely uninterested in the work the teacher had for him. He quickly drew the picture she asked and got up to check out the farm animal toys nearby. She quickly followed him and picked up a cow. “Is this a dog?” she asked. He literally winked at her and said, “No, it’s a cow.” After 30 minutes of farm animal discussion, the evaluation was over. Of course I obsessed a little on the way home—did they think he couldn’t concentrate? Was the work they asked of him too easy? Too difficult? Am I going absolutely nuts and do I need a slap ‘round the ears? Maybe.
Something that was never an issue for us, but became one after we put our lives on TV, was raising our children with more than one language in the house. Simon and I feel it’s very important to teach kids the skill of learning languages and communicating in more than one. We decided it didn’t really matter which language we chose, but if the kids grew up being able to learn other languages and speak more than one, they’d have an easier time learning additional languages later on. We chose French as that’s the one language other than English that Simon and I are both pretty strong in. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the choice of François’ first name—he is named after Simon’s father, a Dutchman born in Belgium. We started speaking to François using both languages shortly after birth. Once we joined the au pair program, we hired au pairs who were native French speakers. Native is the most important word in that phrase; one year we had a European au pair who wasn’t French and didn’t speak it fluently enough to communicate well with the boys. At any rate, our goal was that our au pair would speak only French to the boys and we would speak only English, except when in French-speaking countries, then no English at all. We stuck to this most of the time during our years with au pairs. Our current nanny, however, doesn’t speak French. We speak French some of the time to the boys, and always at bedtime. During preschool, Johan attended a full-immersion program one day per week and his French quickly surpassed François’. Johan also seemed more interested in the language to begin with. François began to see speaking French as a competition with his brother—after dragging his heels for what seemed like forever, he asked us repeatedly to put him in a French after-school program, which we did the following fall. These days they enjoy a once-a-week program after school. Do they speak it fluently? No, and to be honest neither do we—we get by but certainly don’t speak like someone who lives in a French-speaking country. Can they communicate on the playground in St. Barths without throwing a tantrum, and order what they want in a restaurant? Usually, yes. Do they understand that people in different countries speak different languages and learning more than one is a good skill? Absolutely 100 percent yes.

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