The Squeaker at Preschool

The squeaker will be starting preschool next month. I spent a lot of time researching preschools not because I’m concerned about enrolling him in a stellar academic program, but because I want to be sure he is safe and that the school is a nice place. I also wanted a non-religious program, which has made my search challenging since the vast majority of programs are affiliated with a church.

I finally found this program with a purely secular name, and I called the owner to discuss it. It sounded good on the phone, so I told her I was interested. After we got off the phone I did some internet research; one of the pages I found about the school suggested that it was religious after all (it referred to a preschool experience “in a Christian environment”). When I spoke to the owner again, I told her that I had been interested because I thought it was secular, but that if it was religious, it wouldn’t work for us.

She was puzzled about the web page that referred to the “Christian environment,” and she explained that while the school is literally held in a church, it is not really religious. She said that the kids do say grace before their snack, and they have a Christmas tree near the holidays, but that none of the teaching relates to religion. She also said that she has kids of many different faiths in her program.

So yesterday afternoon, we went to visit the school. Because talk about God is so unfamiliar to the squeaker, I told him ahead of time that people at his school might talk about God a little, and that some people believe in God while others don’t, and that he can believe whatever he wants. I was thinking about grace, mostly. He asked me a few questions – why do people believe in God? (I explained about God as a Creator.) Did I believe in God? (No.) Does his papa? (No, not really.) How about his grandparents? (No, for the most part.) He wanted to know if scientists believe in God, too (many do, and some don’t, I told him). At the end of our conversation, he said he didn’t, and I said that was OK.

While we were walking around the school with the owner, who is also the lead teacher, the squeaker was checking out the toys. There was a table with a train track, and he played with it while I asked questions of the teacher. She asked him if he liked trains and if he liked animals. He said he wasn’t really into trains, but that he did like animals.

And then he suddenly said, “But I’m not really into gods.”

Now, the squeaker has a bad cold, and his consonants are a little tricky to distinguish.

“Dogs?” asked the preschool teacher.

“No, gods,” he replied.

I could feel the color rising in my cheeks. At first, I thought maybe I’d just ignore the whole exchange and let them move on to another subject without clearing up the welcome confusion. But the squeaker was undeterred.

“Gods,” he said as clearly as he could. “I’m not into them.”

“Er...I think he said ‘gods,’” I explained in what I meant to be a casual, light-hearted tone. “We talked about how you say grace, and how kids at the school might believe different things.” I really wanted a big hole in the floor to open up and swallow me.

“Oh,” said the teacher. She laughed it off, but now she probably thinks we’re some kind of cross-burning psychos who have taught our kids to give the apparently pantheistic masses the cold shoulder. Ugh.

Silly pipsqueak

The pipsqueak is just reaching that age when babies become lots of fun. Nothing wrong with a 3-month old, or an 8-month old, but in many ways, babies of those ages are lots of work with relatively little reward for the parent.

But now that the pipsqueak is 10 months old, he is as amazing as he is entertaining. He’s on the verge of saying words, I am sure. I think he says “cat,” “ball,” and “mama.” He zips around on his feet, as long as he has furniture to cling to (he can’t stand on his own yet). He can crawl ridiculously fast (especially for the brief moment that the fridge is open and he thinks he can make it there before the door is closed).

Best of all, he thinks the world is a simply hilarious place. In this regard, he is quite different from his big brother, who finds the world an endlessly fascinating place, and who enjoys dissecting, analyzing, and evaluating everything, but who rarely giggles. The squeaker takes pleasure in the world around him, whether he’s collecting bones, learning about sea creatures, or engaging in an elaborate game of the imagination. He is serious, though not sullen or humorless. If he says something is “funny,” he most often means that word in the sense that something is “peculiar,” not amusing.

The squeaker’s dad and I marvel at his astounding memory, his amazing imagination, his talent for understanding complex information, his knack for drawing comparisons between seemingly disparate pieces of information. It is as if someone culled the different intellectual strengths of both me and my husband and gave them all to the squeaker in spades. Of course, I say all this with the bias that every mother has for the gifts of her own precious child. He is no prodigy (thankfully), but he is amazing to me all the same.

I feel that I am just getting to know this little person that is the pipsqueak, and I am sure I still have much to learn about him. But thus far, I am most struck by his exuberance and joy. At bedtime last night, he and I climbed into bed a bit early. He spent the next twenty minutes giggling almost non-stop. He’d sit on his little knees, leaning back to point a fat little hand at the fan, until he fell backwards onto the bed giggling like mad. The fan was funny. Crawling to the edge of the bed so that mama had to capture him and drag him back to the middle was hilarious. Trying to feed papa bits of paper was super-funny. His round little face, with blue blue eyes like dinner platters, is highly expressive. Even when he isn’t laughing, you can see that he thinks the world is a funny, funny place.

He claps his hands with joy. He waves at himself in the mirror and then dissolves into giggles at the hilarity of it. He is the silliest little thing ever.