First week of Raili's school is behind but not without some drama and tears along the way.

On Monday David took Raili to her medial checkup required by the school. It was a normal checkup with height, weight, lungs, heartbeat, blood work....WHAT? Well, things went south after the finger prick - Raili lost it while the Chinese kids took the prick in stride and continued to the next check up station. After David got her calmed down, the doctors asked her to pee in a cup at a bathroom where the other kids had mostly missed (requests to pee or poo in a cup). She would/could not go, even after downing a half a gallon of water and sitting at the waiting room for two hours. After David was miraculously able to convince her to pee (at the adults bathroom two floors up), he was told she can't go to school because she is considered calcium deficient. Come again? So Adam our driver talked the doctors into giving her medicine for it (since a deficiency isn't contageous) and let her go to school. Fine, except that at school they looked at the medicine and told us it wasn't calcium tablets but medicine for an upset stomach... :) 

So the next day we get a note from school telling us she had hard time going to the bathroom and ended up pooping in her pants. Maybe the medicine made her constipated or she was scared of the toilet in school, which is not a sit down model, I don't know. But she now has an incentive program in place for pooping in school. The sooner she does it, the sooner she can get a reward. (Get this, she wants a peeing cat for going poo-poo. Hey, whatever works)

Otherwise, we got no other calls from school to come comfort her (only two on Monday). She rides to school on a blue bus that pickes her up at 8.05am in front of our apartment and drops her off at 4pm. At school she tells me they do numbers (she can already count to 8 or 9 in Chinese), they draw pictures, do arts and crafts, play and dance. They also have an afternoon nap on bamboo mats - each child has their own with a towel as a pillow. She also told David that someone spat on her backback and that she pulled another girl's hair just to see what it was like.

School uniforms don't come until a week or two from now so we'll post a proper picture then. School girls have white polo shirts and blue/green skits (very close to the one Nana bought from Ireland but without suspenders) and boys wear shorts. Uniforms are worn on Mondays and Fridays, otherwise they can wear whatever they want (just keep an extra set in her backpack for accidents, per teachers request).

So that's the story from week 1. More to follow.