I’ll celebrate my second day home sick this week with a few random thoughts about school:

1. It’s funny when people aren’t around high school students much and don’t think like a high school student. Last Friday, I had to listen to the incessant banging of  hammers as they busted up the concrete on the steps below my room. Then they carefully built wooden molds and poured new concrete. Unfortunately, high school sophomores are drawn to concrete, and a few minutes after the workmen had left the steps had already suffered the indignity of random juvenile etchings. Who didn’t see that one coming? Now they have a faint layer of new concrete on them in an attempt to blur the carvings. And thus my stereotypical faith in adolescence is restored.

2. After paying approximately $70,000 for childcare over the past six years, it’s with great relief that I get ready to write my final two checks to Columbia Montessori School. (As I love to point out, my monthly  payment for a single child is the same as my house payment, including insurance and taxes!) While I haven’t always loved everything about them, I’ll miss the small touches of 1968 hippie leftover aura. I love that they’re militant about any child even pretending to make a gun with his or her finger and thumb. I love that they insist on calling every child a “friend”; my kids will come home and earnestly say things like, “We had a new friend visit our class today.” And I’ll truly miss the hidden hippieness like that handmade sign on the paper towel dispenser that says, “Trees Love Quietly.” Let it soak in, brothers and sisters, and my children will be better off for it. (But maybe  not $70,000 better off.)