Is Jade old enough for school?

People are crazy here. They start their kids in school when they're two years old, if not earlier. In my opinion, that is glorified day care. For the past year I have received frequent comments when I'm grocery shopping with Jadyn: "Oh, she not in school?" Me (slightly annoyed): "No, she is not old enough." "She very tall." Me: "Yes, she is very tall." And then I walk away. I seriously have had this conversation more times than I can count. Technically she WAS old enough, but according to me she was not going to start school that young.

Schools are also very competitive here. Like crazy competitive. As I understand it kids do three years of kindergarten, starting at age 3. These years are called K1, K2, and K3 and I believe are generally three hours a day, five days a week (or at least K1 and K2 are). Then they start primary school.

Still unsure whether I even wanted to send Jade to school, I started looking into schools for Fall 2011 back in January. Should be ample time, right? Wrong. I think I visited half a dozen schools, two of which weren't already full. The others only had afternoon openings. The actual application process had started several months earlier. Some of them require transcripts and interviews and large sums of money for the non-refundable application fee. It is seriously insane.

After searching for the right school, we decided on Montessori for Jadyn. At the time our decision to even send her was based on two things: we really want her to learn some Mandarin while we are living over here and Cody's company would pay for it. Therefore, in selecting a school, one of the highest criteria was how much time was spent learning Mandarin. We would have actually preferred to send her to an all Mandarin school, but the one we liked had been over full for months by the time we visited it. All local schools are Cantonese, not Mandarin, so those were out. Long story short Montessori felt like a great option in many ways.

Fast forward to now. Although it still took me some time to get comfortable with sending Jade to school, I knew it was going to be great for her. Then I really had my eyes opened while spending time in Utah. Here is the thing. In the States Jadyn always had kids around to play with. Everyone has neighbors and kids and yards and lots of activities for kids etc., not to mention great weather for playing outside. Here, not so much. We have a teeny apartment with no personal outside space. We don't have close neighbors; all our friends from church are scattered around the city, at best some are 30 minutes away. The few girls in our building that are actually Jadyn's age are all in school and have extra classes (like art, dance, ice skating, etc.) during the week (it seems one child has at least three extra activities a week). All extra-curricular activities are super expensive. So what are we left with? A three year old stuck in a small space with no kids around to play with. Now I finally feel like I somewhat understand why parents here send their children to school at such a young age. It makes sense for the situation. All this time I've been telling myself, "I'm not giving her up, I'm giving her more." Also, with Jadyn's personality I'm fully expecting her to love school. She LOVES being around other kids and loves to learn. That's all she needs, right? I hope. Does it sound like I'm still trying to convince myself? I really do think it will be a great thing. I really do.

We went to pick up her uniforms last week. Poor thing thought she was there to start school even though I kept trying to explain we were only picking up uniforms and school would start in two weeks. She sat herself down on one of the kid chairs and told me she would wait there until it was her turn. It took a lot of convincing to get her out of there without a fit. I'm glad she's excited about it. She starts September 1st.