Details

Whoa. OK now that was a rough patch, in the child-rearing department. Henry started preschool on August 9th, and since then he's attended four days, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, for six hours each time. He is in the "Caterpillars" class. There are eight students and two teachers. The first day was just wrenching, for both of us. He clung to me and SCREAMED when I left. I had been banking on his three and a half year old's sense of decorum - something that has definitely developed over the past year - kicking in, but no such luck. He panicked at the prospect of my leaving him in that foreign environment, and he didn't care who witnessed him totally losing it. We both made it through the day, though, somehow. The teacher called me a couple of hours after I left to let me know Henry was doing fine, holding the flag during the Pledge of Allegiance and dancing during music time. "We took pictures!" she told me, as if I would only believe such claims if presented with pictorial evidence (she was right). Throughout the day, a volley of phone calls flew between my Mom, Russell's mom, and me. We were all nervous for him. When I went to pick him up, Henry was exhausted but happy and clearly proud to have made it through the day. I was unbelievably proud of him myself. Subsequent school dropoffs have been progressively easier, with fewer and fewer tears each time until last Thursday, day four, when he didn't cry at all! He wouldn't even hug me goodbye when I left him; he just sat down at a table and started working on whatever craft the teacher had prepared. I hugged him, though! That day was also the first day Henry relaxed enough to fall asleep during nap time, something he has sworn, SWORN he would never do.

The hardest part for me has been how little information I can get out of Henry about what he was doing during the six hours he was away from me each school day. It takes me days to cobble together even a rough outline of his school day. Often when I ask him questions about school, his response is, "I don't remember." Luckily the teachers give me a paper summarizing the highlights of the day - "Good rester. Ate most of his lunch. Enjoyed Spanish class. Word of the day: "family". Read XYZ books. Sang 'Three Little Speckled Frogs.' " - and that gives direction to my interrogation. "Henry, did you sing a song called 'Three Little Speckled Frogs' today?" "Uh, yes." "How does it go?" "I can't 'member." "Well, does it go like this (singing to tune of 'Row, Row'): 'Three little speckled frogs....'?" "NO, Mommy!" "Well, does it go like this (singing to tune of 'Twinkle, Twinkle'): 'Three little speckled frogs...'?" "NO!!!!!" "Well, Henry, I'm just going to have to ask your teacher to sing it for me when I take you back to school...." I want details!!!!!! I also ask him what his friends' names are at school, to which he responds either, "I don't know," or, "I can't 'member," so I finally got smart and took a picture of the kids' names above the backpack hanging station outside the classroom door, and now my questions are more pointed: "Henry, is there a boy named Brayden in your class? Colt? Dalton? Bert?" (that last one was thrown in to see if he was paying attention, heh heh heh.)

OK, I need to write about my Charlie now, Charlie who will never go to preschool and who will always be at home with me!! Charlie is going through a growth spurt, I think, and he is also getting about eight new teeth all at once. This combination of factors makes him very hungry AND very unable to eat as much as he would like, because of the pain. This, in turn, makes him very grumpy (I gleaned all this from a preverbal toddler, impressive, right???). When Charlie is grumpy, he wants to be held a lot, and if I put him down for a minute because I need two hands to, say, pour him some milk, he wraps both arms around my leg and pulls, simultaneously emitting a loud "Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" sound that I can only describe as apelike. Combine this with the bundle of nerves Henry and I have been over the school issue, and you can see that tensions have been running a little high at the Moore household over the past few weeks. However, Charlie is learning so many new things, I don't even mind (most of the time). He thrives on the days we have alone together - clearly he loves our one-on-one time, and so do I, as much as I miss my Hen. We blow a lot of bubbles and read a lot of books when we're alone together. We go to parks and do grocery shopping at a leisurely pace. (I don't tell Henry any of this. The official version of what Charlie and I do while Henry is at school is: "We were bored. We stayed at home and missed you. Charlie cried a lot. Mommy cried a little" or some variation of that.) Charlie's vocabulary is expanding daily. He now says, in his own Charlie way, "more," "up," "bye bye," "night night," "car," "bottle," "milk," "bee," "mama," "dada," "fish," "cheese," "water," "all gone," and other words that aren't coming to me right now. He smacks his lips if he wants something to eat or he wants a kiss. He has become an inveterate flirt; when he sees a little girl, he dances, he smiles, he does this Charlie nose-scrunching thing, he does anything he can to get her attention. He has a favorite song now! It's "If You're Happy and You Know It," and he really gets into the hand clapping part. He starts clapping wildly at just the opening measures of the song, before the singing even starts! Adorable. We've been doing the toe counting "This Little Piggy Went To Market" thing with him a lot, and now he'll point to his toes and say, "This!" when he wants us to do it. He goes down the slide at the park by himself now! He is quite the climber, Charlie is. I just love him so.

Other family news: (1) Aunt Jana is coming for a visit this weekend! (2) We are going to Gatlinburg with Russell's parents over Labor Day. (3)We have started a Nashville Culture Day within our little family of four. It is on Sunday, and each Sunday we'll take the boys to one cultural thing in Nashville, also working in Indian food as often as possible. This past weekend we took the boys to see Fort Nashborough, and it was a hit. (4) Goldy, the black goldfish I mentioned for the first time in my last post, is no longer with us, and by that I do not mean we gave him to another

loving owner, unless by "another loving owner" you mean God in Heaven above. I'm going to set aside my fish enthusiast hat for a while, I've decided. I think I owe at least that much to Hendersonville's dwindling goldfish population. (5) Russell celebrated his 35th birthday on August 16th. The boys and I got him a cake and a new watch, and I also gave him a virus. The cake and the watch were hits! (6) We have implemented a new Mommy-Gets-30-Minutes-of-Alone-Time-at-the-End-of-the-Day rule. This came on the heels of an afternoon where I very nearly lost my ever-loving mind for want of some alone time. Russell kindly suggested I might run, or read, or meditate during this time. I came up with the following, more practical use of my time:

Before:

And After:

Oh, and finally, (7) I redid the boys' bathroom last week:

It's The Fi-nal Countdown (sung to the tune of the Europe song)

T minus two days until Henry starts preschool. I have hardly thought about anything else all week. On Thursday night I went to meet his teachers and visit his classroom for parents' night. He will be one of ten kids in his class, with two teachers, Ms. Lisa and Ms. Erin, who both seem very sweet and genuine and fond of children, all qualities necessary for a successful preschool teacher, I imagine. The classroom is a three-year-old's dream: filled to bursting with paints, markers, crayons, stuffed animals, clay, puppets, a play kitchen, a doll house, trucks, cars, Legos (!), bins of seashells, rubber insects, stickers, play telephones (old school ones; I'm not sure the kids will even recognize them for what they are!), books, a computer, and on and on. The room is really well thought out, and everything is set up at three-year-old level, including a sink for frequent hand washing. Despite the perfection of the environment, however, I had a mini-panic attack as I sat there in the toddler-size chair listening to the teachers' spiel. I was having flashbacks to my own first days of school (preschool, kindergarten, first grade, second grade, possibly even third grade), when all I did for the first day or two was sob. All I wanted was to go back home to my MOM, and no one could comfort me. She was my other half, and I felt like I couldn't even function away from her. It was so awful! It is heartbreaking to me to think that Henry might feel even a fraction of the sadness I felt when he goes to school on Tuesday! I don't know what I'm going to do with myself from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. that day, but I am relieved I have Charlie to think of, or else I seriously would probably just sit in the school parking lot all day. By the end of the parent/teacher session, I had almost convinced myself to switch Henry to a different school, one where a friend of mine would be his teacher, or perhaps to just go ahead and get a head start on what inevitably would be Henry's fourteen years of home schooling.

Then on Friday morning, at Russell's prompting, we went ahead and took Henry to visit his classroom and teachers, as we had planned. (I was sure it was pointless; Henry would never be able to be away from me!) Henry marched in and sat himself down at the table with Ms. Lisa. He began drawing with the various colored markers and pencils, and he showed Ms. Lisa how he can write the letter "H"! He was feeling shy and only responding with his high-pitched "shy voice" (it's an octave or so higher than his regular voice), but he stayed there drawing for fifteen minutes or so. Then he made his way around the room, lingering at the hand puppets and Legos, noting the easel and paints, playing with toys and just generally inspecting every inch of the room. He wouldn't answer our questions about whether he liked his classroom or not, so engrossed was he in his investigation. "I'm busy!" he responded at one point. Finally we had to leave, and he objected. "I'm still playing!" he said. We took his reluctance to leave as a good sign, and we went ahead and turned in the paperwork officially registering him for preschool there. And now we wait for Tuesday...

In other news...

Charlie: Charlie has begun singing, and he carries a tune wonderfully! The words are still indistinguishable, but the tunes are there. He can hum/babble the tunes to "Frere Jacques," the ABC song, and "Row, Row." It's so sweet, and I think he is going to fit right in with the rest of our family, with our weird singing conversations (do other families do this?). He has a particular fondness for play golf clubs, and he's taken to using this plastic golf club we have as a bludgeon. Henry is usually his victim, and he gets the club taken away when he hits with it, after which he is positively heartbroken, but he always goes back to hitting when he gets his little mitts on it again. I think he finds it amusing! And it is, kind of, except when someone actually gets hurt. Charlie is getting a LOT of teeth in right now, all at once. His canines on top, I think, and whatever their counterparts on the bottom are called, and maybe a few others. Hopefully he will be able to chew better soon, and I can stop nursing and be confident that he is getting enough nutrition from the solid foods he eats. And speaking of canines, Charlie does a lot of barking like a dog lately. "Wooh! Wooh!" he often cries, for no apparent reason. He did it in the car the other day, and Henry exclaimed, exasperated, "Charlie, I don't know WHAT you're looking at, but it's NOT a dog!"

Henry: Henry has been acting a little more wild than usual lately. He has these intermittent aggressive impulses, out of nowhere, which I attribute to his being a boy. For instance, he really beats the living hell out of his stuffed animals sometimes, and he'll say, "I'm knocking him out. He's dead!" which I try very hard not to find disturbing, having read that it's good for kids (especially boys) to get their aggression out in play, so that it won't express itself in real life. Then a few minutes later, he'll be giving another stuffed animal a bottle and putting it to bed, nurturing it. It's all very complicated and mysterious to me, but fascinating to watch. One day this week Henry told me he had "a couple of jobs for me" (I think they both involved fetching toys for him from the car or some other unreachable place) and "three jobs for Daddy when he [got] home from work" (!). He has certain tyrant tendencies at times - the word "imperious" comes to mind - and while I admire his confidence, I'm trying to curb those just a little, because I'm not sure that will go over all that well at school. Or in life, actually. This evening we were playing a game where he disappears under the table, then makes cat sounds, while I look around, confused: "Where did Henry go? I really want him to hear this cat that's gotten into our house somehow. I'm sure this time that this is a real cat I'm hearing." Then Henry jumps out and I say, "Oh there you are, you just missed a cat who came inside!" And he tries to convince me that HE was making the cat sounds, but I insist it was a real cat I heard. We go back and forth until he gets really frustrated, which he does every time, exclaiming, "No, Mommy, it was REALLY me!! I was the cat! Oh, you don't understand me!" And I catch a glimpse of what our conversations may be like when he is a teen.

Other family news: We got a new goldfish about a week ago. Henry named him "Goldy." He is solid black.