Some activities that I cherished with my first child seem like downright drudgery the fourth time around. One of these, I’m sad to say, is going to the playground. Give my fourth child a bath? No problem. Do a puzzle together? A pleasure. But for some reason, taking her to that sandy pit makes my toes curl.

But the swings and slide have captured her imagination. So I’ve committed to take her to the playground, without my cell phone, at least once a week.

Last week, as I neared the half-hour mark of pushing Talia “up to the moon,” I struck up a conversation with a mother next to me. Her little girl was adorable, with all the hallmarks of a firstborn: a hat, sunscreen dabbed across her face, a ziploc full of crackers, and shoes — all things that my child was sorely lacking.

The woman told me that she, her husband, and daughter had moved to New York City recently. “I have just started this nursery school application craziness. Can you explain it to me?” she asked. “Some schools have told me that they don’t have any more applications. Is that possible?”

A wave of sympathy came over me. It was September 18, and she was worried she had missed the boat. I reasoned that anything about the nursery school process I might tell her would only increase her anxiety. So I gave her what I thought was practical advice.

“Try to apply to as many schools as you can and if you like one best, write the director a letter saying why you love the school and why you think it’s a great fit for your family,” I said.

As I left the park, though, I started to wonder how it was possible — at the beginning of the 21st century — that applications to nursery school are still allocated by putting your phone on speed dial the day after Labor Day. Was it not possible to create a more reasonable system of distribution?

This newcomer is not the only New Yorker struggling to muddle her way through her child’s application process. I frequently hear parents of older children trying to decipher the kindergarten process.

“My daughter’s birthday is at the beginning of July and we just don’t know what to do,” a mother of two young children told me recently. “My husband and I think she’ll be ready for kindergarten next September, but the director of her nursery school said we should wait a year. Apparently some schools don’t even look at kids with summer birthdays, while others really stick to the September 1 cutoff.”

A mother of three sons says she’s tired of the private schools and the cutoff problem. “When I applied my oldest child, who is now 14, to kindergarten, September 1st was September 1st,” she said. “You were either on one side of the date or the other. For my third son, 9 years later, whose birthday is in May, one school said we should keep him in nursery school for another year. One school said they’d take him, but he might have to repeat kindergarten. It’s absurd.”

“A lot of the ongoing schools prefer to have older kids,” a nursery school director told me. “Quite honestly, it’s hard for me to place a July or August boy, especially when he is the first child and the family doesn’t have connections to a specific school. So these days, I tell them to wait a year.”

The kindergarten craziness has only been made even more frenzied by some schools’ decision not to accept siblings automatically. “I normally would only have applied my son to the school where my older daughters already go,” a mother of three said. “But the school told me that they couldn’t guarantee the spot and that I should apply to several schools and so here I am, filling out six school applications. To be honest, I’m furious. My son’s an easy, great kid. If he had issues, I would understand their reluctance. But he’s a good fit.”

One mother I spoke to said that while she understands the schools’ desires to choose children who would thrive in their particular environment, rejecting some siblings takes away from a school’s sense of community. “Why would you choose to have kids in different schools?” she asked. “It’s so nice when entire families are at the same school, when siblings see each other in the hallways, with friends who have brothers and sisters who are friends.”

“Since when did the schools become so obsessed with themselves, and their images, that their need to pick each and every child trumped their desire to have a genuine community of families?” she asked.

The fact that schools don’t necessarily take siblings makes sense to some parents, though, who are increasingly searching out the right school for each of their children — yet another reason why the application process is even more hysterical than ever.

A mother of two said that she knows her older daughter’s school isn’t the right place for her son, who is entering kindergarten next year. “I know he wouldn’t be happy there so I’m busy filling out applications,” she said. “She’s at a Jewish school and he probably won’t end up at one, so we’ll have two different vacation schedules, which I’m dreading.”

And then, of course, I have friends whose children are busy filling out applications for ninth grade. “Each school asks the parents to answer why they think this school is the right fit for your child,” a mother of two told me. “I feel like I’m making up each answer. If the school is structured, I write that my daughter thrives in structure. If the school is for self-starters, I write that my daughter is a real self-starter. Meanwhile, these schools are so busy constantly transforming themselves into the latest, greatest place to attract the latest, greatest money, that it’s pretty hard to even know what they want to hear.”

I can’t help but wonder how generations of siblings survived attending the same school, and how the schools survived by having some inappropriate children in the mix. How did boys born in August interact with girls born nearly a year before in September? I imagine everyone fared well enough — without the excessive anxiety that we have come to accept this time of the year.