Lain goes to a Montessori preschool. We liked the Episcopal one that she went to before, but we came to the conclusion that she needed a different sort of interaction than they could give her (which was much more of a group-classroom setting).

The two schools cater to different markets. The Episcopal one is super duper inexpensive, and the Montessori one isn’t. The Episcopal one was religious but in an Episcopal sort of way. But they emphasize it in their literally, largely because I think they know the local market. More fundamentally, though, Montessori schools are Montessori. Open, freewheeling, and so on. Less structured. The result of this is that the Episcopal school had a lot of more conservative, less well off families. A lot of grandparents there at dropoff and pickup either because they were the free babysitting or because the parents were out of the picture (a common thing out here). The parents at the Montessori school had more stay-at-home parents like me, older parents, and generally more liberal parents (or at least hippie-oriented).

There are eighteen kids at the Montessori and around pickup time there are usually three or four Subarus. It’s all so very stereotypical.

Except one thing: The food.

We mostly supply our kids own food, but there are also snacks that we alternate providing. And the snacks and stopgap foods are… crap. Junk food. The junkiest of junk food. Junk food I had never even heard of. It’s enough that it’s often difficult to get Lain to eat the lunch we prepare for her because the salty, greasy chips and whatnot are much tastier. When it’s my turn to supply the food and I ask what they want, they recommend the crappy food that is usually there.

It’s enough to make me (me!!) almost feel like a food snob.