Morning preschool

Morning preschool is so much freaking better than afternoon preschool. Instead of our day being somewhat hackneyed, it went like this:

• Drop A off at school
• Drop C off at work
• Come home for blessed quiet time on my own
• Pick up A from school
• Nap for A
• Lunch for me (and more quiet time)
• Snack, playtime, reading time, dinner for A
• Pick up C from work
• Bedtime for A

Hurray!

Open House and the Switch

Yesterday was Back-to-School night, where parents go to school (apparently with children in tow) and talk to their children's teachers. A mercifully passed out after school yesterday, so our neighbor watched A while I went in. C was swamped at work and could not make it, which was a pity all around. I got to talk to his teacher and his speech teacher.

His teacher is, to quote a friend, "funny and formidable." She just turned 60. She loves the kids, loves doing art with them, and loves reading to them. There are so many books in that classroom that it almost made up for the unhappy fact that preschoolers don't have library privileges at school. Almost. I'm a little sensitive to library privileges.

But she explained to me what she likes to read to the kids and what kinds of stories she looks for, and I'm happy with her tastes and selections. She doesn't like to read down to them; she likes stories that have some theme or moral or meaning. The next unit they're going to do is folklore, starting with Anasazi stories and going through stories from around the world.

They had paintings up on the wall, each captioned by the child's reflection on his/her painting. A's painting said, "I paint for Mommy and Daddy." What a sweetie.

The good news is that A's being switched to the morning class starting Monday. This is really a blessing for us. The days have been hard--A hasn't settled into any set routine for naps. Sometimes he's been exhausted and passes out at 10:30AM, which is enough time (maybe) for a good nap before school, but leaves a long afternoon. Sometimes he's been exhausted and passes out on the way home from school, which is understandable but pushes bedtime back to 8-9PM, which is approaching my bedtime these days and cuts into C and my time together. Sometimes he refuses to sleep and ends up passing out at 5:30-6PM and sleeping until morning, which bypasses our whole bath/teeth/PJs bedtime routine and leads to earlier mornings.

So starting Monday, he'll be in the morning class. Aside from juggling his swimming classes, it'll be a lot better.

Cobblers and sewing and more, oh my

We're having a baby. It's due in December.

This may not have been clear previously, but I'm a wee bit Type-A sometimes, particularly about holiday preparations. I like to have my Christmas shopping done by Thanksgiving. I like my Christmas plane tickets bought by mid-August. I like schedules and order and predictability.

This whole baby in December thing throws me for a loop. I'm trying the serenity prayer and deep breaths. I can't change when Baby 2.0 shows up. I can't change the onslaught of the holidays (although I can embrace the fact that we will not be traveling this year over the always-exciting holiday season).

But I have the wisdom to produce cobbler. Lo, behold: one of two cobblers I made this weekend. The peach season is almost over here, but we had a bunch on our counter perfectly ripe, too many to eat. Our peach cobbler recipe comes from Cooks Illustrated. You bake the fruit until the juices start to extrude, then drop a sugar cookie batter on top by the spoonful and bake until it's done. Delicious, pretty simple.

Fruit went into the disposable pan, topped with parchment, frozen. Cookie batter got dropped by the ounce-ful onto parchment, then plastic bagged. When December and the baby come, we'll be able to pop the pan in the oven per instructions, drop the frozen cookie batter on top, and have summery delicious peach cobbler. As long as we remember to take the plastic bags out.

We have made this with great success with frozen fruit before, but there's something satisfying about not having to mix or measure anything. Now I'm waiting for apple season to be in full swing so I can freeze some pies.

Contrary

The word for A at three is contrary. There's a lot of not listening, a lot of testing, and a lot of outright disobedience--a "give me that" turns into throwing said object in the absolute opposite direction. Happily, he does this to both me and C, so it's not just me.

Sometimes he's so sweet and cute and adorable, and sometimes I'd happily lock him in a closet for an hour. I figure those impulses will pass--oh, maybe when he's thirty, if we're lucky.

The mantras: It's just a phase. This too shall pass. Consistency is the name of the game.

Getting Ready

I've found myself more easily irritated by the world in general in the last few weeks, and I think it's a sign that I need to be slowing down, taking it easy, and preparing for Baby 2.0.

C and I have been struggling with how to making the concept of Baby 2.0 real to Baby 1.0, and we're unfortunately both pragmatic enough to say, "Oh well, none of us have any clue what we're about to get into and it'll happen when it happens. Let's go to Disneyland instead."

We've read books; A talks to the baby and feels it move (this one's a stretcher, not a kicker, which makes it more difficult for A to tell). We talk about babies and families when we see other people with them; we talk about how babies sleep and cry and nurse. (This he remembers, at least to the point of pointing to other people feeding their little babies juice and French fries and telling them, "No juice for baby; babies drink mommy milk!" Alas, there are times where I'm happy A is not completely intelligible to others.)

One of the things we did as a family this weekend was make Baby 2.0 a play mat according to Amanda Blake Soule's Handmade Home. A picked out fabric and ribbons for it (with Mommy vetoes on the pink safari animal fabric and the snapping crocodile fabric); we all colored on the top fabric together. I assembled it yesterday and poof, it was finished. That gave me more comfort than a lot of the other things I've been doing recently have.

I'm trying to embrace more of those experiences. This means yes to finishing the family-related sewing projects like family stockings, yes to lazy time just spent reading (even the non-baby stuff), yes to freezing cobblers and pies for use later this year, and no to taking on more responsibilities with my various volunteer activities, like not volunteering to bake a hundred cupcakes for a party. Just because I can do it doesn't mean I should.

Dr. Horrible

I know it might be odd, but some of you may not be familiar with Dr. Horrible or his sing-along blog. You can watch it on Hulu and I'm sure lots of other places, but it's Neil Patrick Harris.

A is not among you. He's decided he's Dr. Horrible. I just ordered him a costume through the Old Navy baby sale, but jeez, I'm tempted to try and find a baby Dr. Horrible costume.

Three-hole drilled book recommendation

While I read voraciously, I don't usually recommend books to people randomly. I read pretty quickly, so a lot times I'm not sure if the time investment a book represents to me is worth the time investment to other people.

But I read this book recently (within the last month) that seems to creep into a lot of my conversations since then, so I thought I'd put it out there. It's by Paul Tough and it's called Whatever It Takes. I heard about it on This American Life, which is a good teaser if you want a preview of what the book is about: Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone, which is (crediting This American Life's description) "the most ambitious and hopeful solution to urban poverty in the country."

It's the program President Obama is hoping to replicate in twenty cities around the country, just for your current event edification.

There's a lot in the book that talks about how to get kids to move up and out of lower socioeconomic levels and how difficult it is to get kids to move beyond where their parents are and how early those things are set (you know, like age three or seven or ten). If you want to go to college, there's a lot of skill sets that go into that beyond math and reading proficiency; there's the soft skills of patience, persistence and delayed gratification/long-term goal setting. Research is showing those soft skills needs to be in your makeup by ten-years-old or they're near impossible to learn. If your parents don't have those skills and thus couldn't achieve those goals, where will you learn them?

These topics have been coming up a lot in our household what with the onset of preschool.

Like yesterday. I went to Target (Tar-zhay) because we were out of toothpaste and our laundry basket died and so on and so forth. As I wandered office supplies looking for crazy glue, a woman stopped me, a normal-looking woman, just like me.

"Do you know what this is?" She showed me her shopping list, which was a school supply list, and tapped the words Three-ring spiral-bound notebook.

"Are you wondering if they mean a three-ring binder or a three-hole-drill notebook?"

She looked mystified. Absolutely mystified. So I walked with her to the notebooks and explained the differences between a three-ring binder and a spiral-bound notebook and showed her how to look for the three holes on the notebooks.

I walked away thinking, how the hell can you be a grownup and not know what a three-hole spiral notebook is? But then I thought about the child that she was buying the supplies for, and I thought about Geoffrey Canada.

There are advantages I knew A has in life: the basics of two parents who both live at home, a safe place to live, food to eat, clothes to wear, medical care, not to mention all the enrichment opportunities he gets like the zoo; parks, playgrounds, and the beaches; lots of good books and toys; swim classes; speech therapy and preschool; trips to museums, Sea World, and Disneyland. But I hadn't considered having a mom who recognized a three-hole spiral notebook an advantage until yesterday.

Preschool! Chocolate milk!

Wow, he's at preschool now every day.

He's in the afternoon sessions, which I don't like but apparently nobody does and the new people get stuck with afternoon classes. Yesterday he took a nap after school; this morning, he conked out two hours before school. I'm not sure how this nap pattern is going to pan out.

First day, we're there early with the other early birds. The kids run around and play on the grass; the parents chit-chat about how old the kids are and how many we have. The ages in class range from three to four, with A being one of the youngest.

Time for class comes, we all sign in our kids, off they go. One or two are crying, some walk hand-in-hand with their parents, but A runs right in without a backwards glance at me.

The parents all wander in and stand around snapping pictures while the teacher calls the class to order, has them sit on the floor around her. She goes through attendance and my motherly heart swells with pride as A is one of only two kids in this class of twenty-four who knows to raise his hand and say, "Me!" when his name is called.

After roll call, the teacher says it's time for us parents to go, and as I'm wandering out, he turns and waves at me with a big smile and says, "Bye, Mommy!" Then he blows me kisses.

It was too much for my little pregnancy-hormone-drenched heart to bear. I made it to the car before I teared up.

Anyway, the first day, he did great although he had some bathroom accidents, probably because he was just too darned excited to excuse himself to use the facilities. They get free lunch (who knew?) and all he would tell me he ate was two Pooh cookies and chocolate milk. (Damn you, school district and your chocolate milk; we were keeping him away from chocolate milk's addictive pull.)

Today we got to school and he played with the early-birds again and then gave everyone big hugs. Oh my, he's sweet. When I picked him up, he was accident-free (hurray) and cried when I said it was time to go home. The teacher reassured him that he'd be right back tomorrow.

And today's lunch? A Nemo cupcake and chocolate milk. (It was someone's birthday today, hence the cupcake.) I need to get a copy of that lunch menu.

In awkward conversation news, I called his previous preschool and explained:

• We found out last minute he'd been accepted by the school district when we thought he'd been rejected,
  
• he would be receiving speech therapy through the school,
  
• and unfortunately, it was just easier to send him to the school district's preschool.
  

I did not reiterate that the school district's preschool is free, which has amazing appeal, or that since he's in at three he'll probably be in at four. No, I said that we had no qualms about the school or the teachers and everyone was wonderful and I hated to do it. And she was fine and cheerful so that's all well. So I've officially given notice and just need to go by and pick up his stuff.

The school district speech teacher and I are playing phone tag to get A set up for speech, so that should be coming along soon. Then we'll have to have tearful goodbyes with his speech therapist. Sigh.

Preschool drama

I got a letter, oh, a couple weeks ago saying A got turned down for public preschool.

I got a call yesterday reminding me that preschool orientation was today at 1pm.

You know, for the preschool he got turned down for.

So I went.

He got in.

He starts next week. Tuesday.

Now I have to figure out how to explain this to his current preschool.