Family Friday: Brea Dress
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Going somewhere warm with the kids? This cute dress from Rylee + Cru works for both play and dinner out.
Made from soft yet durable 100% cotton, this summery dress has an empire waist and puffed balloon sleeves. It’ll be tough to choose between the gelato print (pictured) and the seahorse one.
The Brea Dress is $55 and comes in sizes 3-6M to 8-9Y.
Sales of note for 3/21/25
(See all of the latest workwear sales at Corporette!)
- Nordstrom – Spring sale, up to 50% off: Free People, AllSaints, AG, and more
- Ann Taylor – 25% off suiting + 25% off tops & sweaters + extra 50% off sale
- Banana Republic Factory – 40% off everything + 20% off
- Eloquii – 50% off elevated essentials + extra 50% off sale
- J.Crew – 25% off select linen & cashmere + up to 50% off select styles + extra 40% off sale
- J.Crew Factory – Friends & Family Sale: Extra 15% off your purchase + extra 50% off clearance + 50-60% off spring faves
- M.M.LaFleur – Flash Sale: Get the Ultimate Jardigan for $198 on sale; use code CORPORETTE15 for 15% off
- Spanx – Lots of workwear on sale, some up to 70% off
- Talbots – Buy 1 get 1 50% off everything, includes markdowns
I’m trying to figure out if we should accept or decline a high ability placement for next year for my current first grader. Our school uses a cluster model so 2-3 of the 8 classrooms for each grade have high ability “clusters” mixed in with kids who aren’t in the high ability program. Those classrooms, in theory anyway, have teachers who have more experience with high ability kids and use more differentiation to allow kids to work at very different levels.
In the “pro” column:
-Although there was no formal high ability screening for first grade for her grade level, my kid was informally tracked into a high ability teacher’s room for first grade based on her K standardized test scores. She’s had a great year and her teacher has been absolutely amazing.
-Her three closest friends (who were all in her K class, one of whom was also in her first grade class) will all be in the high ability program
-She is way above grade level in math and really benefits from the differentiation there, although it’s also very easy for us to supplement math at home
In the con column:
-the big one: her reading is probably average at best for the district and way below average among the high ability kids (although, weirdly, her language arts test scores are higher than her math scores). Her closest friend, who was in both her K and 1st grade classes, is an amazing reader but has always been super kind and encouraging to my kid. But other friends are not as nice, and I worry a lot about teasing from the high ability kids or her getting labeled as dumb because her reading is so behind where most of the kids are.
-Anecdotally I’ve heard that some of the high ability teachers are kind of intense and assign a ton of homework, which I don’t think would be a good fit for my kid. Our first grade teacher wasn’t like that though.
-Socially, I see the decreased mixing among the high ability kids as a negative, but she also does aftercare and Scouts and has a lot of close friends in both groups so it’s not like she’ll only socialize with high ability kids
Would appreciate any thoughts! It’s hard to talk about this with in real life friends and I don’t feel like I know anyone on the fence about it. Most people in our area are pretty tiger parent-y so the reaction is “of course you accept a high ability placement” but my gut reaction is really “I don’t know.”
Help with constipation for babies?
My 8-month-old daughter had a bad bout of constipation around 6 months. After trying water and juice, our ped recommend a laxative. We’ve been giving a low daily dose of Miralax for the past 6 weeks but when we tried to taper off, the constipation came back immediately. She was clearly in pain and we were worried she’d start withholding so we restarted the Miralax.
The ped doesn’t seem concerned but it seems insane to be giving daily laxatives to a baby this young, even a low dose. Thoughts? Have you found anything else that worked for chronic constipation?
Ugh. When people have family crises that make them unable to do their jobs, I wish they would just take leave and delegate their work to the people who were hired to have that work delegated to them, instead of hanging on and insisting that they can catch up and that no one else can possibly do the work and making everyone else miserable and wrecking the project.
Wise hive, any tips for getting preteens to talk to you? DH and I got a note from DD’s teacher yesterday saying teacher was concerned because DD seems to be caught in the middle between two friends who are fighting over who gets time with her (at recess, sitting next to her at lunch). She asked if DD had said anything to us, and she hasn’t! So…do I broach this with her? Any tips for getting her to share more with DH and me? She’s always been a very private but also shrug-it-off person. (I’m the opposite so it’s hard for me to relate.)
Lots of discussion lately around kids and eating, but here’s another question. We don’t keep juice in the house for obvious reasons. When we go to a bday party with juice or lemonade, my 6.5 year old daughter almost chugs it. She’ll take 3 juice boxes (not all at once, but over the course of a 2 hour party), when she eats sweets she kind of shoves it in her mouth. At restaurants she begs for juice or lemonade and we don’t order it unless it comes with the meal. She has a sibling who’s been raised the same way in relation to food but has completely different eating habits. My daughter is a bigger kid and potentially verging on overweight. I don’t want to turn this into some battle, but it obviously isn’t good to have so much juice. She’s generally a picky eater, but likes a lot of bread/cheese type of foods like many kids. Tips?
I’m very belated from Wednesday’s post about private schools, but wanted to add a few things. FWIW, I attended a rival school of one of the one’s OP is looking at, and I have a few friends who have gone back to teach at our alma mater.
The comments about connections – yes, the school gets you connections and opens doors but not in a smarmy way. More so that most students have a really deep connection to their school AND they know that anyone who graduated from that school is going to be competent, smart, and hardworking. So, it’s not that as a student you’re there looking to make connections (a thought that never once crossed my mind), but rather that the school has connections that you can leverage. I identify more as an alumna of my school than I do of my college. I know a lot of people who got their foot in the door from an alum or (or a parent of an alum or current student) with whom they never once crossed paths – a friend of mine was hired by a guy who graduated 15 years before us because the school was able to leverage the connection. It’s very much a community and not “just” a school, so if an alum receives an ask from the school, a fellow alum, a teacher they’ll almost always make the time to have coffee and chat. The league these schools are in is similarly tight knit – I might rib on an alum from a rival school but I also know that they’re also going to be competent, smart, and hardworking.
Yes, teachers in private schools don’t need certifications, but in talking with my friends who have returned to teach your first year is almost a whole-year student teaching year or “apprenticeship” with lots of observations, one on one mentoring from an experienced teacher, and there’s a weekly meeting or class for new teachers to work on teaching and advising related skills. Much like schools have math centers and writing centers for extra help, there’s also a full time teaching center to work with teachers on professional development, instructional coaching, continuing ed on pedagogy, and curriculum development. Yes, teachers make less than they do at LM or Radnor, but that also means they really want to be there (and conditions are better, and all teachers are involved in several extracurricular activities so they really know the students as people). Teachers here have less classes (and smaller classes) than public school teachers do so there’s more time to focus on other aspects. Plus, without teaching to a test they have much more flexibility in how they teach. Even without getting into the academic standards or curriculum, it is definitely different.
I would have preferred more economic diversity (I was a middle class kid there) but if you’re living in a very good Main Line school district, it’s not like your public schools have this either. Each InterAc school is different, but most have very generous financial aid and scholarship programs so the schools aren’t as rich as others may imagine. It’s still not very “real world”, but it’s no different than being at Radnor High School.
The point of this post is not to say that OP should definitely choose a private school, but rather to dispel some stereotypes