Preschool fun!

Even though we have a really cute new baby, we still decided to keep our first. I figured, since he's still our kid, I should write a blog post about him.

He has been going to preschool at a Methodist church near our house. There's been an interesting mix of kid time and religious time. It's been interesting to see what new habits he has acquired because of the differences between Methodist and Mormon customs.

The first change was when he informed us that Miss Cindy (one of his teachers) doesn't fold her arms -- she puts her hands together to pray. As he seems to always doubt our intelligence, but firmly believes his teachers to be infallible (more on this later), he decided he would do that for some time whenever we pray.

Then there was his's first song. He's gone to Primary at our church for years where they have singing time. However, he never had much interest in learning the words or the music. He had stage fright the one time he went up with the Primary to sing in Sacrament meeting. We just figured he'd grow into it. Well, at his preschool, they pushed singing a lot harder (or better (or both)). He finally decided about halfway through the year that he liked singing. The following was the song that he sang continually for several weeks:

Oh the Lord's been good to me,
And so I'll thank the Lord
For giving me
The things I need:
The sun, and the rain, and the apple seed.
The Lord's been good to me!

He called it the "Johnny Appleseed Song" (because it talks about apple seeds partway through). I just decided to look up the words on the internet, and found the following page which gives some slightly different lyrics (http://www.ultimatecampresource.com/site/camp-activity/the-lord-is-good-to-me.html). Since that page says "apple tree" instead, I'm inclined to believe that he attached Johnny Appleseed to the song after mixing up the words.

It's been quite nice because since that song, he is willing to learn the words to all kinds of songs. A wonderful change: He used to scream at me if I sang along with songs on TV (The Wiggles) or the radio (my music).

About teachers versus parents: It'll be interesting going forward to see how we're able to handle this. He is absolutely convinced that everything his teachers say is absolute truth. It's actually a bit worse than that, because he's convinced that his memory of what his teachers said is absolute truth. It's a fairly common occurrence for Heather or I to say something and have him respond with "But my teacher said XXXX". It's particularly fun when his memory of what his teacher said is obviously false. I'm sure this is just the beginning of many years of him informing us that we've always been wrong because his teacher told him differently.

During the week before Easter, they talked a lot about Christ's death on the cross and the empty tomb. I really liked the crafts that he came home with that week -- especially a coloring page with a rock that could roll away to show a tomb with just an angel in it (the rock was a brown construction-paper circle connected to the picture with a brad).

They also gave him a little cross that says "God is Love" which he decided was for the baby. He really took that cross to heart as evidenced by some little things he's done. For instance, he had two pieces of blue painter's tape (we always have some of that because we're never done painting walls). He decided he had to put them somewhere, so he put them on the back door of our house and informed us that it is "the cross of Jesus".

All said, I'm really glad that he has been able to go to preschool this past year. I'm sure he's far more ready for kindergarten next year (7:30-2:30!) because of his time in preschool. Because of his teacher's infallibility, they've been able to get him to work on sitting still (something he never listens to me about) and several other important public school things.

Now we just need to find a way to survive the three months this summer where he doesn't go to any school at all...