It's May 29th. Nine years ago today Myke & I tied the knot on the absolutely stunning and beautiful Hawaiian island of Kauai. It was amazing. I close my eyes and just wish myself back there. Even if just for a moment. It was such a fun week and 1/2 trip. We rented an ocean front house with a pool for friends and family to stay with us at. You could snorkel right off the back yard. There were sea turtles RIGHT there. My favorite. The guests consisted of such a fun crowd and mix of different people from different parts of our lives. We basically invited all friends and family to come. Put out the Save-the-Dates a year in advance so if anyone wanted to save up for the trip, they could (that's a long trip from the east coast, where most of our friends and family were located). We ended up with a great group of people from all different parts of our lives. Apart from both of our immediate families we had some aunts and uncles, a few cousins, some college friends, a co-worker from a past job in Virginia, a grandmother, some San Diego friends (we had been living in San Diego a couple years by the time we got married), two friends from Australia, an employer, etc. Everyone flew in at various times and most had their own accommodations set up. We spent a lot of time with the guests both before and just after the wedding. We had a cocktail pool party at the rental house to welcome everyone to the island, Myke's parents took everyone to a luau for the "rehearsal dinner", a bunch of us went on a snorkeling boat tour a couple days after the wedding, and quite a few people went to the rope swing and cliff jumping area together. The weather was perfect the entire time. I can almost feel the refreshing ocean breezes on my face right now...ahhhh. Snap back to reality....not that I can complain too much about reality when reality is San Diego. What a fun trip though. Then Myke and I returned for our 5 year anniversary and renewed our vows. Maybe we'll go again next year for the 10 year anniversary? It is tradition now, isn't it? Who wants to step up and take care of 4 small children for a week? Anyone? Hello?? :)
Well, I can't type for long. Need to get ready to head out to Chloë's future elementary school's Open House Night. We've had some exciting news happen to us in the Chloë-is-going-to-elementary-school arena. Backstory: back when Chloë was in T-ball (last Fall?), I was speaking to a mom about schools and she mentioned she was going to apply for her twins (same age as Chloë) to go to the Dual Language Immersion (for Spanish) program at their school for next year. Well, as we are relatively new to this area, I didn't even know a thing about this program but I had started looking at one down where we used to live back before the move happened. Anyways, in an attempt to make a long story short: I looked into the program, put Chloë's name in the lottery for it, and then all but forgot about it. The chances of her getting accepted were quite slim from what I was hearing. First of all, the programs were not offered at her home school (which is right up the road from us, very convenient, has a beautiful campus, great parent involvement, great test scores and supposed to be a GREAT school, overall....which is part of the reason we moved to this area). So this program is currenlty only offered at two of the other eight elementary schools in our district. The programs only accepted 48 children at each school. 24 of those children need to be native Spanish speakers. 24 need to be native English speakers. Of the 24 native English speakers, 70% of the chosen children will come from that home school. As in that, they would already be attending the school where the DLI program is offered (each grade has two DLI classes and two "regular" English-taught classes). So we were in the 30% of kids that were applying from different "home" schools. They only were taking 7 or 8 students "like Chloë" at each school that offered the program. So pretty small chance, depending on how many people actually apply. Anyways, I all but forgot about it until a letter came in the mail earlier this month saying "Congratulations!!" and that Chloë's name had been picked from the bucket to attend the DLI program at one of the schools that it was offered.
So here we are, a few weeks later. A few weeks of thinking about it, weighing pros and cons (this school is a further drive, won't go to school with neighborhood friends (5 of which are starting kindergarten next Fall)), talking to the principles from both our home school and the possible new school with the DLI program, chatting for hours on the phone with parents of children in the program currently, googling and reading about the 90/10 immersion model that is used, researching success rates, lots of discussions between Myke and myself, etc. As NONE of the cons have outweighed the pros, or come even close-we've come to the final decision that we WILL put Chloë in the program. We're super-excited about it the further we go and more we find out. Today I had a chance to visit the school and see both a 5th grade DLI class and one of the first grade ones. I was blown away with how well the first graders were speaking in Spanish and how wonderful the teacher seemed. We're all going back tonight for the Open House. I'll post more about it later!
**I didn't put much detail about the program in this post, but to sum it up, it's a K-6 program in which you are taught in Spanish (90% of the time in K and first, and then less each year on up through 6th). The goal is to have the students bi-literate in both English and Spanish by middle school. I wish I had done something like this when I was in school! Not sure if anything like this was even offered where I grew up...
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