Sundays are always a busy day for us. We have church in the morning and the evening. We are running around like crazy all day long. Today was not much different except we had an obligation during the afternoon. So from the alarm clock going off we knew we would be busy. We expected crazy with children in the mix. My preschooler comes in my room wearing this tutu dress that is so short if she bends even the slightest her undies are shown to the world. I inform her that she will have to change her clothes. She seems … Continue reading →

I am a worrier. A relentless one, actually. I like to tell my husband that I’m a realist. He doesn’t buy it. I do worry about a lot when it comes to my preschooler. She is a bright, sweet, caring kid. I look at her and I see pure innocence. She gets so thrilled by the smallest thing, and is so willing to give love to everyone around her. She is a people person like me, I think, and doesn’t care too much for being alone. She likes friends. At this age, it is pretty easy to make friends. That … Continue reading →

It was the fall of my daughter’s second preschool year. We were all set. We knew what we were doing. We knew the teachers and we loved them too. Aside from some small initial anxiety, at three years old my daughter had sailed into the classroom with excitement, happy to be playing with other children and joyful to see her beloved teacher. It was all good, simply the beginning of another school year. And yet it was not. For three months at the beginning of her second year of preschool, my daughter did not want to go. She loved her … Continue reading →

Coordination does not run in our family. We are a family of tall people, and I grew very quickly as a child, reaching far over five feet at the tender age of twelve. My daughter seems to be on a similar growth program and at four she is often mistaken for a seven-year-old. While it is delightful to be able to reach high shelves, being tall has its disadvantages. One of these can be poor coordination. My daughter didn’t reach her physical milestones very quickly. She sat at around ten months, crawled around a year old, and walked just shy … Continue reading →

What can your preschooler say? Now, I’m not talking about nice big words like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious here, even though we’re big fans of Mary Poppins these days. No, I’m talking about enunciation. My daughter has a name that is difficult for small children to pronounce. More specifically, she has a name that has an “or” sound in the middle of it. She pronounces this sound as “ow,” leading most people think that her name is something else entirely. Needless to say, this is very irritating for a four-year-old. Now, when people ask her what her name is, she spells it for … Continue reading →

I knew that it would arrive some day – the era of telling stories, that is. While my daughter has been joking for a while and she tells stories all the time in her play, until now she has rarely tried to pass off these stories as truth. Lately, though, there have been some wild and not-so-wild stories about happenings in our home. In our house, we close the bedroom doors when we are not around so that our cats won’t frolic on the beds while we are gone. Today I was graced with a story about how she’d left … Continue reading →

Well, it’s Boxing Day up here in Canada, which means that it’s one of the biggest shopping days of the year. There are lots of “I wants” still to be filled, I suppose. We had a lovely Christmas, and my daughter acted as the inveterate consumer, getting all but one of the toys she’d asked for. Lucky her. Of course, she doesn’t really realize how lucky she is, because no matter how much discussion and volunteer work we do, she’s only four and she’s still working on empathy. You know, the feeling that the world doesn’t actually revolve around you? … Continue reading →

I’m sure that I could be a hit at fourth birthday parties. You see, I work at a nature center, where I often talk about animal poo, because that’s an animal sign that we use when we’re tracking. And pee? Well, that’s a scent marker. Sometimes I even talk about throw up – some animals regurgitate to feed their young. From the small children, I am met with various gasps of delighted horror. Occasionally I’ve been told that I’m not to use potty language. That is, I’ve been told that by the preschoolers in the room. Now that I have … Continue reading →