Events prior to Junior Kindergarten

There are three parts to this post.

First: Thank you for your encouragement to continue to write these entries. I was pretty certain that I would either bore people or annoy them because I've never written about this subject before, and I was trying to gloss over or compress things a bit, so that I could then get back to what people are used to reading from me.

I was going to write one post; it got long, so I broke it into two. It's not two posts. This, by the way, will give you some idea of why I'm so very bad at estimating how long either a book or even a series will be: I feel as if I know what I'm trying to say going in; it's clear, to me.

But then I need to make it clear to people who don't have my brain, and I find that takes more words than I originally thought; that the underlying structure has to be explained in clear, concrete steps, and that I forget about those steps when I'm thinking about only the conclusion.
( the second and third parts below the cut )