DEEP DIVE: Back-to-School Back-to-Ones

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0:32Amy Wilson:We're messy in the mornings. I hate the mornings. What fresh hell. Laughing in the face of motherhood. It's like a TSA line every day, sounds like. With Margaret Ables. And Amy Wilson. Don't care about a healthy lunch. That's the most important part of making my lunches. A podcast that solves today's parenting dilemmas. So you don't have to. I'm the COVID Cassandra.

0:59Amy Wilson:hello everyone and welcome to what fresh hell laughing in the face of motherhood this is margaret and this is amy and today we're talking about back to ones for back to school some of you have been back to school for like six weeks already so sorry about that but our kids are just getting back now yeah that's right so if you're back already we're taking your advice If you're heading back. Yes, if you're already at winter break, apologies. But yes, we are taking some advice. We are giving some advice. We are going back to school. Amy, I think you're going to start us off with a mailbag. Oh, yes.

1:32Wait a minute. Time for mailbag. Wait, wait, yeah, yeah, yeah. Check the mailbag. We have a lovely mailbag for today. A listener from our Facebook group wrote in to say she was going to be listening to our episode when typical parenting advice just doesn't fit. That was a couple weeks ago. She said, I'm going to be listening to this episode on repeat. My sweet four-year-old son is diagnosed autism spectrum disorder. And this episode made me feel so incredibly seen as we are just beginning to navigate the school and societal norms. Thank you for giving me and all the other parents and caregivers of kiddos who don't quite fit that traditional mold, the reassurance that we're doing a great job just by doing what works and what's best for our specific situation.

2:14This episode truly meant so much. Oh, I love that. I think we heard more about that episode than any episode we've ever done, which is delightful. Thank you for letting us know that it matters.

2:25Amy Wilson:Yes, I love that. And we will also, as we talk about back to school, be talking about kids on the spectrum, kids who are not neurotypical, kids for whom school is really difficult, because this I think can be a really good example of somewhere where parenting advice is not one size fits all. And that school, listen, I have three kids and school is a very different experience for all three of them. And so to have a wide range of kids and say, this is what works for back to school, that's not happening. You know, Jen Hatmaker put out a post a couple years ago, and then this year, for whatever reason, it was everywhere.

3:04And I'll put the link in the show notes. I put it up on our Instagram, just saying like, hey, everyone, it's back to school. Just a reminder, don't schedule anything for the evenings of the first week of school. Don't schedule anything for the weekend. That means you too, mom, dad, right? Just do nothing. Your kid's going to come home. Everything's wrong. They're right. You're a terrible parent. Turn the TV on. They will be destroyed after a summer of much less structure getting back into this. And I needed to remember that. And that's true, no matter how old your kids are. And you know, whether they're typical or neurotypical or not doesn't matter.

3:40They're all going to take this transition pretty difficult, I think.

3:44Amy Wilson:Yeah. And realistically, I was just thinking about this as we're recording this, you know, we are going back to school next week, we're still on vacation, we are in fact, on our last like week's vacation, I am staring at beautiful Cayuga Lake right now out the window. and my kids are sleeping late, laying around and looking at the screens, then going out, doing a little fishing, jumping in the lake, coming home, having lunch at two o 'clock if they want. Like we are in for a world of hurt. We are not working at all on transitioning. You know, we are going to just go from like, we're going to crash into the brick wall of school and it's going to hurt bad for all of us.

4:23Amy Wilson:We're ice plunging back in. I'm doing the same thing this year. my uh i'm dropping one of my kids off at college that's right driving five hours talk about when typical advice doesn't fit like oh my gosh right pack the lunchbox doesn't fit for you you've got a kid going to college no i'm dropping off a kid at college and then driving five hours and then my youngest kid starts school the next morning after a five-hour drive and that's just the way it is and yeah well they have the notebooks they need i don't know i haven't thought about that yet it's a little much. Yeah, I think that our perspective now my youngest is who knows what 10 11 something like that.

5:02Who knows?

5:03Amy Wilson:I don't know. But older than five younger than 14. I can assert. Yeah, she's in there somewhere. But I will say I think that back to school is firmly and like check me if I'm wrong, is firmly in the it gets better category. Like it feels to me like I look at some of this stuff. I mean, maybe that's not right. But I feel like the like, oh my gosh, you have to have glue sticks. Like I do feel like you just kind of go, they get a laptop on the first day. Again, here's a tip. There is laptop pickup for four different days where you can go and wait in a three hour line. We're away. So my kid will walk in and be like, I never got a laptop and they will hand him one.

5:45Amy Wilson:Like you can skip. I mean, I'm sure that's very annoying advice to the admins who are trying to like not have to deal with 3 ,000 kids who don't have laptops on day one. But I do feel like the like, do you have chalk is out of my life right now. Yes. And also, you know why it gets better? Because if your first grader doesn't have a glue stick on the first day, and Ms. Murphy says, don't you have your glue stick in your pencil case? And like the shame, right? It's like the, the nun from Game of Thrones banging the gong, you have no glue stick, right? And I think it's very different when you have a high schooler who like, oh, shoot, but doesn't have the right kind of graph paper, like, I'll get it.

6:27Amy Wilson:I will say on the flip side, when you have older kids, you have to claw them out of bed with like the jaws of life. I mean, my little kids when they were little, they all were up at six. So you know, it's like, we were ready for school by seven without a huge problem. Like, this takes me to my central question, Amy, which is we talked about this on another back to school episode that we did. Are you a boohoo parent or a woohoo parent when back to school starts? Okay. And it gets, I feel like when the kids were little, I was such a woohoo parent, like our crossing guard used to laugh at us because all the other parents were coming down the hill from dropping their kids in kindergarten, like in tears.

7:04Amy Wilson:And me and my husband were basically like skipping down the street hand in hand, like happy as can be. I found the filling the days for young kids very challenging. And the idea that it was someone else's problem from eight to three was my heaven. You know, I'm going to quote my spouse who just this morning over a cup of coffee said to me, get these kids back in school. That's a direct quote. I think that's a common feeling. It's funny. I am a dreader. So he's a woohoo. And I'm a boohoo. I'm like, I can't believe summer's over. It's getting dark sooner. It's so sad. Yeah, you do hate the end of summer.

7:39I hate the end of summer. And then as soon as, and I spend most of it out of New York City, and then we live in New York City for the school year. So I come back to New York City. Like, I hate school. I hate New York City. I hate everything about every decision I've ever made as an adult. Why do I do things this way? And then two days into the school year, it's like, oh, all right, this is how we do things. I'm back in busy town, and it's fine. But it's a tough transition.

8:02Amy Wilson:I guess it's kind of seasons of life, too. Like, right now, we had an amazing summer. My kids are a great age. They're very independent. Like I wasn't running the cruise director job. I was just, we had a very chill, very nice, slightly overbooked, but generally phenomenal summer. And then the idea of like 630. I hate more than anything on earth, waking up to an alarm clock. And so I've actually my husband wakes up early now, he just wakes me up. But like, the idea of going back to the 630, like, and then having to get out of bed and like, start the process of getting grumpy kids out of bed. And our morning routine is, I think the word is a crop fest, Amy.

8:50Amy Wilson:It's a hot mess. It's a disaster. We hate it. Everyone hates the morning. And we're just a bunch of miserable, sleepy trolls, like trying to find not glue sticks anymore, but like some sheet of paper that was the French assignment. Right. And the first day, there's a little bit of excitement about it. And then the third day, it's like, what have we done? I can't believe we have to do this again. Yeah, it's back to one, it's time to start moving the bedtimes earlier and all that stuff we don't want to do. It's time to reset. And that's the thing. I do love the routine and having the kids out of the house and being, you know, a working person, like having time to myself to work in peace.

9:27Amy Wilson:A lot of my summer was like, I mean, I'm doing it right now recording and like I hear footsteps outside the door, like leave me alone. You know that I'm very much looking forward to retiring. I'm just really not looking forward to the like so and so forgot their flute and now I've got to bring it in. And we're just we're messy in the mornings. I hate the mornings. I probably shouldn't even say this, but I'm going to tempt fate by saying this is going to be a more typical school year than we had the last couple of years. And I really hope it stays that way. Wow, you really are just calling fate.

10:03Amy Wilson:As Irish Catholic ladies, we know better than to ever say, this will be a great year. Nothing will go awry. Yes. Well, I mean, we had COVID in our house twice this summer. I'm the COVID Cassandra. Yeah. You're still doing it. You thought you couldn't get COVID for 90 days after you had it? Guess what? Yes, you can. I can't. I can't explain it. And I know some of the schools I know already, people who I know and family in the South, like their schools have had to shut because it's not just COVID. It's like there's so many people sick in the schools, like strep, COVID, flu, whatever, that stuff is starting to come in.

10:38Amy Wilson:But yes, I do appreciate and often I feel like it's very hard in life to actually appreciate good versus bad. But having been through COVID, not having my kids home on a laptop yelling at me that I don't know how to do chunking in multiplication tables or whatever horror show we were stuck in, I will always appreciate like them just like getting out of the car and going into school. Could be worse is what I'm here to say. Could be worse. could be worse. So of course, we took to our Facebook group, facebook.com forward slash groups forward slash what fresh hell cast. And I said, we're going back to one for back to school.

11:23Amy Wilson:What's working for your family? Any must avoids? Also, feel free to just complain below, which let me tell you many, many people took me up on part three. Good, good, good. There were many, there was a great use of the Viola Davis emoji where she's just grabbing her bag and walking out in disgust. The slow head shake. I guess that's a gif, not an emoji, but you know what I mean. A lot of use of like the disgusted Viola Davis gif. Kira said she does not have a tip. She does not have a complaint, but her little one is starting kindergarten soon. Does anyone have tips for younger kids on getting them out the door?

12:03Amy Wilson:She is a first time mom and has no idea what she's doing. And I'm going to tell you, Kira, that we have so many good tips and so many people weighing in and especially about getting kids off in the morning. I have a tip for this one. This is my sister-in-law's tip that she did when her kids were younger. I don't think she's still doing it. Kids are as old as mine, basically. But it really worked well for them, which was a morning playlist that was the same and let the kids pick the songs. They can obviously change after a month or whatever, but they pick the songs. and when you know the next Taylor Swift song comes on oh it's time to go upstairs and brush our teeth and then the next okay it's time to get our shoes on that they knew where they had to be in their morning routine by the songs that they liked that they were listening to and having upbeat music on in the kitchen just sort of helped keep moving things along and how does that is there like a poster that says like shake it off means go brush your teeth like I think she the first you know time they did it like oh shake it off oh that means it's time to go brush your teeth like And when you have a kindergartner, she just kind of made it up.

13:05You have buy-in, you have branding. As I always like to say, the lady says, right? When Shake It Off comes on, that means it's time to go brush your teeth. Like says who? Like says, you know, Alexa. So off you go. And a kindergartner will do that and we'll buy into a routine. And let's see if we can have our shoes on before the end of the song. Most kindergartners, not all. Let me tell you that the advice of the lady says and putting a lot of the transitions and

13:35Amy Wilson:decisions on an invisible third party is going to be playing a great role in a lot of our back to ones today. So just start preparing yourself for that mentally and we'll be right back. Okay, Heather came in strong. And this is something a lot of people said. I'm going to say all of these back to once and all of this advice is use it if it works. So Heather led the charge on making school lunches the night before, like lots of beforehand prep. I can hear me laughing because I can see Margaret's face. You're like, okay, so Heather says I can see in advance. Okay, so Heather, who is some sort of organized freak from a different planet, making lunches the night before.

14:26I mean, I guess it's definitely the right thing to do if it works for you. How about like sometimes? How about you do it like on Tuesdays when everybody's home by 6.15?

14:35Amy Wilson:No? I will never make lunches. It's just not going to happen. That being said, I do do school hot lunch. This is for people who are me, hot lunch. It's It's a small-ish expense, and I never make a lunch. My kids get school lunch. But it depends on the school. I mean, a lot of kids don't have a cafeteria or a hot lunch. Like, if you have to make school lunches. Let's assume. Like, I grew up not having a - I guess if you have to make school lunches, you should move to my town, because they make them for the kids. But yes, I guess so. Don't most schools have a cafeteria where you can buy lunch, or is that unusual?

15:12Well, not like this little preschool or a daycare or a small parochial school. No, it depends on the school.

15:18Amy Wilson:Yeah, I guess that's true. I gave up on lunches two years ago and it changed my life. Oh, yeah. I would say if there's a cafeteria, you use it. Do my kids eat like a bagel with nothing on it and some candy for lunch? Almost certainly they do. Do I care? No, I do not. Don't care about a healthy lunch. That's the most important part of making my lunches. It used to be my job to make lunch for a couple of my younger brothers and sisters, the ones who are old enough to be going to school with me. And I remember I would just about every day, deposit the peanut butter sandwich that I brought from home.

15:50Yes, it was a long time ago. Peanut butter sandwiches were fine in school, but I would make one every morning and then take it to school and throw it out and go buy an ice cream sandwich because we didn't have cafeteria, but we could for a quarter buy an ice cream sandwich. That was a great lunch.

16:02Amy Wilson:Yeah, that's right. We definitely had a hot lunch cafeteria in my school. And I think every school I went to had some sort of hot lunch cafeteria. But yeah, there were vending machines like a Snickers bar, it's fine. Anything that gets you through the day and I'm not making lunches. Kate says what works for her is setting up a homework station with all the supplies ready to go so no time is wasted looking for stuff. I didn't have a homework station per se, but I did have like a basket, like a laundry basket, kind of plastic basket, much smaller, but that's where everything went. The scissors, the stapler, the this, the that, and it all went in there so it could go out in the dining room table and then it was time to get ready for dinner and I could just get all put in there and put away until the next day.

16:41Amy Wilson:I will say that we're in full like back to one mode in terms of I do think it's important. And you know, we are full chaos. And especially in the summer, like there's just junk everywhere. It's a complete disaster. That being said, I do think it is really, really important to start the school year with like cleaned like we're this weekend, we will be doing a lot of, let's go through your desk, clean out anything sticky. This is their little desks at home. Every kid has a little desk or the downstairs like workstation. We're going to clear everything out. Like I do think it's a good practice to go back to one before the first day of school.

17:21Amy Wilson:Although I will say we're running on a tight schedule this year. And that may be like happening during the week of the first week of school. In an ideal world, I want everything like clean and clear and like lined up pencils. And, you know, like we're ready to go. I think mentally, it's very nice to have that feeling of like, we're ready to go. And the decks are really clear. I love back to school supply shopping, the new notebooks, the new box of pencils. I love it. I love it more than the kids do. See, we now do the thing where and Sadiq has my back on this. She says, I paid a lot for the pre-packed supply box.

18:01Amy Wilson:It's fine. It's a fundraiser. And that means like they bring the box of school supplies to your house. You order it like through the school, like gift wrap or candy or something like that, through the school and it's a school fundraiser. Yeah, and you get this giant box of school supplies that's supposed to be everything your kid needs. Now in Sadiq's case, she says she still ended up at OfficeMax on a Sunday during a hurricane because the box did not contain all the things they needed. They didn't have glue sticks or Expo markers. Oh, Expo markers. I feel like - Who needs Expo markers? That's a thing now for kids.

18:36Amy Wilson:I feel like Big Expo has really invaded the school system because my kids have a lot of Expo markers. I guess they do in math. Like they're writing on the walls now. They have a little dry erase board. It's like a half pint on Little House on the Prairie would have like her little chalkboard. Like now they have like a little dry erase thing that they work on. Laura has one that's kind of blowing my mind. I never really considered. She says we are on the third week back to school. and what's working for us is getting the kids totally ready before breakfast. I'm talking clothes on, shoes on, and tied, sunscreen on, hair done.

19:12Breakfast is such a powerful motivator and all the things get done quickly. Then they just have to brush their teeth and we're good to go. Pro tip, adds Laura, they wear bathrobes on top of their clothes that everything stays clean during breakfast. This knocked me out. Other people were like full dress and they put a towel on top of them. This is a great idea. And shoes, because getting them, the breakfast is the hammock of the whole thing, right? It's the saggy part of the U-curve of getting them out the door to school. They're motivated, then they sit down and they start looking at their cereal bowl.

19:42Amy Wilson:The breakfast is the hammock part of the whole thing. I don't think I would have ever thought about it that way. But you mean, it's like the roadblock. It's the place where everything shuts down. It's like, boom, boom. Right. And then they just sit there until you're like, come on, come on, come on, come on. Until the next Taylor Swift song starts. Another thing I know a lot of people, do you do, are you like a hot breakfast household? I don't like eggs. We've covered this extensively on the podcast. My husband likes eggs. Yeah, that's true. We definitely know about the egg problem. So if my husband is home, he makes, quite generously, makes eggs for whoever wants them.

20:15But if he's not, then it's kind of a cereal or toast kind of morning. What about you? Catch is catch, Ken.

20:20Amy Wilson:We kind of over dialed in. I think I grew up in a hot breakfast household and it never occurred to me that like hot breakfast is optional. So yeah, like when my kids were little, we were doing like pancakes, French, like breakfast, like short order cooking breakfast. On school mornings. Wow. Yeah. And waffles, sausage, always bake it like, and then, you know, I definitely probably over dialed in on that. And it was part of what made it so difficult, you know, was like actually this incredibly elaborate meal, which takes me to Lindsay, who says, you're on your own for breakfast at our house. This is not a Waffle House.

21:01Amy Wilson:Grab a Pop-Tart or some cereal. And I wish I had read that advice earlier because we definitely were running a Waffle House and it was really challenging. Lindsay has other great advice that I want to dial in on. Feed your kids before you ask them about their day. We've often said this. Let's talk about end of the day. What is it called? Post-school regulation drop-off? What is it called? It's called after-school restraint collapse. After-school restraint collapse, learn this phrase, get it on a t-shirt. After-school... You're living it. You might as well know what the name for it is. You might as well know.