First Day of Preschool!!

September 10, 2008

We're not going to lie to you hear (at least on this particular post, who knows about the rest of them). This has been a huge week. First over the weekend we took Parker to a sibling class at the hospital. I'll write more about that later, but he is now officially ready to be a big brother.

But on Tuesday, he had his first day of preschool. The little boy is all grown up - but it was pretty cool. Didn't start out that way. Perhaps Julie and I had been trying too hard to get him excited about the whole school thing. Here's the play by play.

Tuesday morning we have to wake him up at 8:30 (man he is lazy). The first day of classes started at 10am rather than the normal 9am . So we get up and get him all ready. And I mean Julie and I are fired up, we're jumping all around (maybe not Julie) saying dumb stuff like "who wants to go to preschool!!!!!" And Parker seems to be getting into it because he said "I am psyched to go to preschool!" (yes, he actually talks like that - he gets psyched).


So anyway, we go down to have breakfast (cracklin' oat bran) and we're sitting there having just a lovely little morning. So I start to give him some watermelon. So he's happily eating the watermelon, and Julie tastes the watermelon and thinks it's gone bad. No big deal we have other fruit - so I throw it away. Holy meltdown batman! I mean he starts to lose it. Julie is trying to console him, offer him different fruit. We actually had more watermelon, but it wasn't cut up, so I didn't mention that until later (Julie ended up getting fired up at me for holding out).

Even after I cut up the new watermelon, he's still pissed because he didn't want that watermelon - he wanted the other one. Mentioning that the old watermelon was in the trash didn't seem to do much good.

After about 10 minutes he finally starts to calm down and Julie looks at me and says "yeah, I don't really think he was that fired up about some watermelon"

Needless to say, we are off to a great start. So we head off to school, and meet the teacher (Mrs. LaRitz). So she gives about a 20 minute little talk about how she structures the class. And while all the grown-ups are listening Parker has camped out between Julie and I playing with (go figure) some construction trucks he's found. And he is taking a dump truck and running it up my one arm, saying "the dump truck sounds like this vrrroooooommm!" and then down my other arm.

And we're trying to whisper to him "why don't you go play with some of the other boys and girls" "Ummmm, no thanks." After I pointed out a jackpot of trucks over in the corner he keeps saying to me "come on daddy, come with me to get the trucks" So I am basically saying to him that he can go over and get them, to which he responds that I can go with him. After a couple of minute of this, he finally gives up and tries to get mommy to go with him "Mommy, come get some trucks."

Julie leans over to him and whispers something, and he just gets up by himself and gets some more trucks. I asked Julie what he hell she said to him; and she responded that she pointed out that all the grownups were sitting and listening, but all the children were playing. She couldn't go and get a truck now, because she needed to listen. It was amazing.

Finally the time had come that we had to leave the little man (although only for forty five minutes). Didn't really know how he was going to take it, and obviously the teacher must have picked up on some of our hesitation, because she asked Julie if he was going to be okay. We looked back in the room - and there he was happily playing with like eight construction trucks. Not any other kids, mind you, but the boy had his trucks and he was going to be fine.

And I will say that when we came back to pick him up, he really did seem to like it. He said that he wanted to go back - and that on Thursday it was going to be show and tell. He is bringing a John Deere dump truck. I did not see that one coming.