Tips & the Small Stuff
None of these are big. All of them would have saved us something.
01Connect to the Perimeter wifi. Every time.
Cell service on campus is genuinely bad. If you're in a meeting, at an event, or trying to pull something up in the hallway, you'll be staring at a spinner. Join the school wifi once on each device and forget about it.
02The café is the move
Coming to any event with kids in tow? Get there early, grab a coffee at the café, and let everyone decompress for fifteen minutes. It turns a stressful arrival into a pleasant one, and it costs you nothing but showing up sooner.
03Label the water bottle. And the clothes.
Water bottles, jackets, sweatshirts, lunch boxes, anything that leaves the backpack. The lost and found is a humbling place. A label maker or a laundry marker pays for itself in the first month.
04Don't stress the first-day supplies
You can organize everything perfectly, and then the teacher runs her classroom a different way and it all gets redistributed anyway. That part is genuinely out of your hands.
The guide the school sends telling you what to bring is spot on. Follow it exactly. It's the how you organize it part that's not worth losing sleep over. We've put the 4th grade list into a checklist you can take to the store. See Supplies & Uniforms.
05You'll hear about eDays. They may not be yours.
eDays come up in school-wide communication, but they don't apply to every grade. 4th grade and up doesn't do them. If your student is in that range, you can let those emails go by.
If you've got a little one a few grades behind, eDays will land on you eventually. When they do, don't stress. The email you get includes instructions for connecting your laptop or phone to play videos and show pictures, and there's a full guide to building one out. It's much more manageable than it first sounds.
06Ask us the dumb questions
Seriously. The acronyms alone will get you, since every school has its own vocabulary and nobody hands you a glossary. We didn't know either, and someone told us. That's the whole system.
Email 4thgrade@baliles.com. It reaches just the four of us couples, so it is a safe place to ask anything. See Contact Us for how that works.