Doing the Best We Can for Our Kids

Three years ago, when it was nearing the time for our oldest child, our daughter, to enter Kindergarten, we decided to put our house on the market in order to start her off in a different school district. Our local elementary school had good reviews for the first couple of years, but all I heard from several neighborhood parents were complaints about the later elementary years, middle school and high school. We only have one chance to raise our children, and my husband and I wanted to provide the very best possible education that we could, from the start, for our daughter. Unfortunately, this was right before the housing market took a very unexpected great big fall.

Our house sat on the market for a while, showings brought little interest. We were doing everything we thought you were supposed to do when selling a house and nothing was happening. We were running out of time…

We were taking a vacation in Whistler one weekend so we
could be away while our agents hosted an open house. Only one person came to
look at it.

Then I got a call from a friend that would change our path in a big way and would help our family. She was excited as she told me about an article that she just read; was offering open enrollment opportunities. I called my Mom and asked her to please fill out the form for me and fax it in immediately, since we were out of town. Then we waited.

We thought maybe we should just take our house off the market and start our daughter in our local school. I took her to Kindergarten Roundup there. I felt defeated. I forgot my checkbook to pre-pay for the option of full day Kindergarten. I told them I’d be right back. My daughter and I got in the car to head back home when I got a call, a call from Mercer Island School District. They had one last spot in half day Kindergarten for her. That was it. We took the spot and took our house off the market.

Last September, our son was beginning Kindergarten and was
accepted into the afternoon half day Kindergarten class as the sibling of an
existing student. This is when things got complicated, since we still lived in
Newcastle. My daughter needed to be at school by 9 a.m. but my son started at
12:30, so after dropping off my daughter we would either drive back to
Newcastle, or we would hang out at reading until his 12:30
drop-off. At which point I drove back to Newcastle, ran errands or would go
back to Tully’s until pickup at 3:30 p.m. My son and I became an official regular
of the Tully’s coffee crew. Add to that after-school activities and play dates.
Basically, I was doing a lot of driving back and forth between Newcastle and
Mercer Island. It’s a relatively close distance, but with traffic and up to 6
trips back and forth in a day, it got crazy. There didn’t seem time for
homework or daily chores. The weekends were spent catching up on the overflow
of the week. I felt like we weren’t spending quality time as a family. Something
had to change. We knew that we wanted to move to the Island as soon as we could manage it, but was this the smart time to put our house on the market? We
decided to think outside of the box. Why not lease out our house and move to Mercer Island… and so we did.