Parkrunner

If financially you are only just breaking even whilst working right now, there must have been other reasons you returned to work after number two. Don't lose sight of those in your exhaustion as it's a massive shift to not working at all. Right now is absolutely the toughest stage of parenting - they need you just as much from age 1 to 2 as they did from 0-1, except now you're trying to fit work in too. But in six months or so it will get easier. Giving up work altogether is a pretty big solution to a short-term situation. Are there any in- between steps you can take to make life easier for yourself in the short term? Reduce the number of hours you work rather than stop altogether? Can your husband do more to help on the home front? Or if that's not possible because of his work, can you outsource any of it to someone else, eg. an au pair, so you have an extra pair of hands around the house?

AllBrick Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Personally, myself, my son and his mother have > never had a BCG, never had any problems either > and, dodged the lovely scar it can leave. > > We're vaccination sceptics as well, totally > different story though. Maybe, Allbrick, you have simply been fortunate so far not to come into contact with anyone carrying the TB virus, hence you have 'never had any problems'. Since the rest of us seem to be doing the responsible thing and getting ourselves and our children vaccinated to limit the disease's prevalence in our community, here's hoping your luck holds. Here's also hoping that enough people don't share your attitude and therefore sufficient herd immunity has been created to protect those with auto-immune diseases and other conditions that mean they are not able to be vaccinated but would suffer the worst if they did contract this (and other) horrible disease. I'm really happy for you that you've managed to avoid a 2cm scar on your upper arm. Must really have enhanced your pulling power.

We have a lovely au pair joining our family in a couple of weeks. Does anyone know of any local au pair networks - or just have an au pair themselves - that we could connect her with to help her settle in and make friends? Thank you!

Your best bet is probably to ask a nanny agency - they will see so many different types of child care arrangement requests and know which ones they tend to be able to fill and which ones not. We recently used Dulwich Childcare to find us an after-school nanny and they were fantastic.

This may be a stupid question, but you do realise reception entry is 4+, not 5+? Important for two reasons - 1. That you apply at the correct time! 2. That means your LO is just three when they are assessed and so what the school is looking for is not absolute knowledge (ie. the sort of stuff you can tutor, although good luck with that at age three!), but rather whether they can sit still and listen; concentrate on a task for a long enough period of time; absorb information and then use it (eg. listen to a story then ask or answer a question about what they have heard). Having recently gone through the whole school decision-making process that you're now going through, I know the stress you're feeling and the fact there's no way of knowing whether you're making the right decision for your child. But reading your and your wife's increasingly frantic posts about Alleyn's on here over the last week, I'm starting to feel like the best advice I or any other poster can give you is RELAX. You say your child is not yet three. S/he is going to change and develop a lot between now and 4+ assessment time and then again between the assessments and actually starting school. It's impossible to know right now whether Alleyn's is the right school for them, but if you set them on a hot-housing path from the age of two because for YOU it MUST be Alleyn's, you could risk killing off their love of learning, irrespective of how academically able they are or aren't - not just because you can't possibly know at age two whether they're as gifted as you would like, but also because at two, they do their learning through play (for which Montessori is great) and not through tutoring. Sorry that this is unlikely to be what you wanted to hear, but the short answer is that there is no silver bullet way of getting them in to Alleyn's. And in the meantime, your repeated posts on here looking for one were making me stressed for your child!

Our son is also in the pre-school room at Townsend Montessori and we are very happy with the preparation it has given him for school. However, I'm not sure it's a fair comparison with somewhere like Ducks. Ducks is part of a private school and so I would imagine more likely to prepare children for private school entrance assessments, whereas Townsend is a daycare facility with a very good pre-school room, but with most children going on to local state primaries. That is not to do Townsend down in any way, but it just depends what you're looking for. Without any sort of 'official' preparation, our son sat the assessments for St Dunstan's, Dulwich Prep and Alleyn's. He was offered a place for St Dunstan's, put on a short waiting list for Dulwich Prep and got nowhere with Alleyn's. We weren't overly distressed at this as we had liked the feel of St Dunstan's the best and had been pretty underwhelmed by the reception classroom at Alleyn's, which felt like a broom cupboard - for ?14k a year! As another poster here has already said, reception places at Alleyn's are more than 10:1 over-subscribed so chances are extremely slim. Even if your child does get in at Alleyn's, the school does not then automatically offer younger siblings a place when they are due to start school, so you may find yourself having to do the school run to two different places in due course if you do have other children. However, if your heart is set on Alleyn's, the ratio of applicants to places at 7+ is better than at 4+ for reception. So you may be better off going with Ducks, as if you are unsuccessful at 4+, Ducks will continue preparing them for 7+. An acquaintance of mine has both her children at Ducks and is very happy with it; loves the nurturing environment. However, she is looking at transfer to Sydenham High at 7, not somewhere as competitive as Alleyn's. If money's no object, then fair enough, just decide which private school you like best, but if you're in the same boat as us, where private primary would mean no holidays for the foreseeable future, then don't rule out the local state primaries either as there are some good ones. Much as we loved St Dunstan's, we decided it wasn't ?13k a year better than our first choice local school and we could make up the extra sport, music etc outside of school. Good luck with your decision - it's incredibly tough!

Did you log in to eAdmissions and decline the place there?

Hi Chief Jeff, thanks for the insight. Am I understanding your post correctly - that aside from some nursery rhymes, children that arrive at JKPS monolingual are essentially only being taught in English and only children that arrive bilingual are being taught bilingually? I've spent the last week feeling very disappointed we didn't get JKPS (our first choice) for our monolingual son as I really wanted him to learn German and have the gift of bilingualism, but from your post it sounds like we may not be missing out so much after all...?