Last night I went to register Captain Jelly Belly for nursery school. It’s just two hours, three days a week, but since he’s a little shy, and I’m a little overly protective, we figured it was good for both of us if we started to ease him into the idea of going to school.

The whole registration experience was surprisingly like the stuff you see on sitcoms set in New York or Los Angeles, where families rush to get their kids on waiting lists and wait for hours in lines and fight to get a spot. Luckily I have a good friend who warned me about the event. First of all, there’s a package of like, 20 forms that you have to fill out. Then you have to have copies of your kid’s immunization records, and copies of your own ID so they can do a police check (so you can take your turn being the in-class parent helper once a month). Then you have to give them a whole set of post-dated cheques to pay the tuition, fundraising amount, and registration fee.

I got there more than half an hour before the doors opened and was third in line, but within a few minutes there were about 20 people in line. Eventually a woman came out to hand out numbers, and there was plenty of joshing around — I did get my number 3, but people later in the line were clearly budding and pushing to get a higher number. When the doors opened we rushed in to try to grab a spot. Kids who were already in the 2-year-old program got to pre-register for the 3-year program, so already there were only six spots left in the 3-year-old program that we wanted to get into. A pre-screener checked my package to make sure everything was filled out and all my cheques and attachments were present — anything missing or wrong, and it’s the back of the line for you. Then I spent several minutes aggressively protecting my place in the line — lots of people hovered near the front of the line, ready to jump in if the opportunity presented, or pretended to be registering for a different program in order to be ushered to the front, only to try to line jump. It was nuts!

After I took my turn (and won one of the spots), I saw another friend of mine in line who really had no idea what was going on. She’d shown up hoping to register but didn’t even have a package, let alone all the attachments and cheques, and by then, there were at least 25 people ahead of her — there was no hope of getting in. She was quite overwhelmed but there wasn’t anything I could to do help her. In the cutthroat world of preschool registration, it’s every Mommy for herself!