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.