Proud Mama Bear

I'm so very proud of my daughter.

This year we applied for early admission to Cascia Hall, a private college preparatory school, where my hubby graduated. She would attend this school from the sixth grade upward until graduation. This is the school that P. C. Cast used as her inspiration for her House of Night series.

Sixth grade in our school district is where all the elementary schools converge. Just our elementary school alone has just under 100 kids in her class. Multiply that by 13 elementary schools. True, none of them has the class-size our school does, but you get the picture. No matter what, it will be a HUGE change for her.

In addition to the huge financial obligation, there were a series of steps to be finished in this process.

--we had to fill out an application form

--our daughter had to fill out an application form, writing an essay. It's HER essay, so all we did was a basic spelling check. How many parents would have re-written it? Probably more of them than not.

--two teachers had to submit a recommendation

--It's a Catholic school, so we gave one recommendation to our priest. This is the first year she hasn't attended Sunday school, because they moved it to Wednesday nights. She has swim practice on Wednesday nights. If it was still after church on Sundays, she would have attended.

--she had a shadow day. We chose a day that her regular school had teacher meetings to schedule this because she didn't want to miss regular school. She thoroughly enjoyed it.

--she had to take an entrance exam. WHICH SHE SMOKED!! She didn't know how well she did after it was over--we asked--but we just found out. She placed 1-2 grades higher than the 5th grade in both reading (6.7 grade) and math (7.4). This was good news.

--and we had an interview two days ago. The middle school principle mainly interviewed her, but we were asked a few questions. She did really, really well with this: good eye contact, coherent speaking, thoughtful answers.

Though-- I will admit-- I had my doubts about her attending. I knew enough about Cascia to know that these kids must learn to self-motivate themselves to do homework, study, plan and complete projects, etc. But this year, I saw a HUGE change in her motivation. At the end of last year, they had a program for the kids who made Honor roll--School honor roll and Principal's Honor roll-- she was on the Principal's Honor roll with straight A's.

--and liked the feeling.

I haven't had to nag her about doing her homework, working on projects, etc. She has taken the intuitive with her homework AND ACC Math. She plans ahead on her projects and even led her group on the most recent project.

Part of this could be due to having swim practice almost every night, and competitive swimming has become a real love for her.

But now comes the waiting period. We won't hear whether or not she gets into the school until mid-January or February. And no, not everyone who applies actually gets in--even if you do have money to throw around.

I just wanted to let everyone know how proud I am of my kidlet.

Later, Peeps