So.  Went to see this school.  Long story short:  it’s amazing.  Amazing.  And then we sat down with the director of admissions and the principal, who had led our tour, and I brought up the tuition issue.

Now, I was already aware of what their tuition was going to be for my son.  It’s… we’ll say considerable.  It regularly elicits a low whistle or a raised eyebrow from people when I tell them the number.  But the thing is, quality day care is amazingly expensive, and we’re already spending something like 90% of the cost of tuition at this place on day care, so the move from one to the other is not actually that extreme over the long run.

The problem is that I was expecting a move from $X to <$X when we moved beyond the preschool years, because preschool classes 1) are resource-intensive, 2) are tiny, and 3) contain two adults as opposed to one.  I was thus startled to hear that rather than going from $X to <$X, tuition beyond the first year is more like $1.8X.

X was already ludicrous.  $1.8X provoked open laughter from several people today.  We do not make remotely enough money to pay $1.8X.  That’s Scalzi money.  But goddamn, this is probably the best school I’ve ever set foot in, and they offer a fairly robust financial aid package, and the principal looked me in the eye and told me flat-out that they do whatever they can to keep their families once they get them.  And honestly?  Even if the boy’s only there for the first year and then we can’t get it together for the second, we’ve still got that first year.  Honestly, the ECE classrooms impressed me more than the rest of the building did.

So we’re gonna see what we can do.  Meanwhile, buy a book, goddammit, and if anybody out there is interested in optioning me for film or TV the rights will come cheap.

And then I went to my school, where this afternoon’s activities involved finding out that a student at another middle school had committed suicide last night and left a note behind that blamed some of our students for the bullying that led to her suicide.  Also, unrelated, I collected two bullets from one of our 8th grade classrooms.

Did I mention the other school offered me a job?  Yeah, that happened too.  And I had to turn it down because it wouldn’t pay me nearly enough to make my bills.

I’m kinda depressed right now.