A couple of nights ago, we went to family orientation night at Thomas’ preschool. He’s going to be going two mornings a week to the little preschool held in our church. We really liked it when we visited last spring, and Thomas was VERY excited to go to orientation night.
The night started out with a few opening remarks addressing parents and kids, but then they took the kids to their respective classrooms and spent a little more time with business type stuff with the parents. Thomas marched down the hallway without looking back and apparently was good and cooperative during the entire 30 minutes or so that he was in the classroom with his teachers and the other kids. (I was not entirely surprised to hear this, but I was a little relieved. He’s been known to tackle kids, which is fine if the kids are expecting wrestling and want to wrestle, but sometimes they aren’t.)
Once we were done learning how to pay tuition and follow regulations, Will and I got to go back to the classroom and see what the kiddos were doing. When we arrived in the room, Thomas didn’t even want to talk to us. Instead, he was methodically moving through the room, making sure to play with everything and making sure he knew how everything worked.
There were two highlights during this time:
1. At one point he pulled this hat and these necklaces off the dress up rack:
In this photo you can see the lovely multi-colored nature of the hat more clearly:
What you can’t see is the huge fake flower, fashioned from the same lovely purple and pink of the rest of the hat, on the other side.
Then he started yelling, “Hey! I’m a farmer!”
I guess that, minus the color, it does sort of look like the straw hats Thomas has seen on “farmers” in some children’s books. I’m not sure how the necklaces fit in, though.
2. As we were leaving, we stopped to say goodbye to Thomas’s teacher. I was talking to her about some logistic or another, and Thomas quietly raised his hand. We’d read about raising your hand when you want to talk in a book about getting ready for preschool, but he’d never done it before. I thought it was super cute that he had remembered it. His teacher was charmed, I think.
Teacher: Yes, Thomas?
Thomas: I have a dog at home named Otto. He is a good dog, but sometimes he pees and poops in the house.
Teacher: . . .
Me: Oh, Thomas, Otto almost never pees or poops in the house. He hasn’t done that in months and months.
Teacher: Oh, that’s okay, sometimes dogs do that.
Thomas: Otto does it sometimes.
Teacher: Thomas, could Mrs. K. [the other teacher] and I come over to your house sometime and see you? That would be really fun.
Thomas: Yeah, you can come. Then you can see how Otto sometimes pees and poops in the house.
Me: [sigh.]
By the time we left the orientation, Thomas had been in the classroom for about 50 minutes. As we were leaving the building, he asked me “Why is preschool so short?” Which I guess is a pretty good endorsement. And with this much excitement in just those few minutes, I’m sure that we’ll have plenty to post about here on the blog in the coming weeks.
