Finding a school... that will accept Oscar!

This morning we had to register the kids at the school. We went to the closest one, the Escuela Manuel Acosta located at the entrance of Playacar. The director was nice and professional, but unfortunately the kids had to do a test. Two teachers came to take them to separate rooms to take the test, and I was surprised that M&O left with them without saying a word. Did they finally mature into law-abiding students? Our hope was short lived. Turns out that Oscar only agreed to participate to the first 3 exercises and just wanted to flip the pages to see what’s next. Matthias was more cooperative but still borderline. In the end, the director told us they could not accept Oscar, and recommended another school with a more “liberal” approach to learning, called Papalote.

On our way to Papalote, we made a mistake and entered into another bilingual school just a few blocks away, called Yats’il. The building was beautiful, with a lot of tropical character with wooden shade and a big internal courtyard with a playground and green everywhere. Once we realized the mistake, we went to check out Papalote but I did not like it so we went back to Yats’il (which we found later, has an excellent reputation).

School starts sometimes at the end of August. The kids will wear a uniform: short sleeve polo shirt and short pants but closed shoes! I had a very good impression of the school director and her daughter, who seems to be in charge of admissions. They had lived in Paris when the daughter was in Kindergarten and their French helped my Spanish. It was a good connection. Anyway, we decided to pay monthly. You never know with my kids how things are going to turn out!!!!

We also had to renew our car rental while we are still looking to buy a used car. By the time we got home, the France-Portugal had already started.

During the game, the kids were playing in the pool and were looking at a bunch of teenagers who gave them their first taste of life at 16 years old: cigarettes, French kissing, etc. Well they could not have learnt that at the Red Hook pool because there, you are not allowed to kiss!

France beat Portugal without glory, so we will have to figure out how to watch the finals on Sunday. I hate France-Italy games because many times the French just get lucky without making too much effort like today against Portugal.

After the game, the kids wanted to practice swimming on their own, like “big boys”. Oscar was jumping into the big pool, almost touching the bottom then swimming back up to me. Matthias was going back and forward between Alain and the ladder. They were really excited about learning to swim on their own. Maybe they will not be corporate executives but they seem to have potential with physical activities.