Grandparents and Special Friends Day

Every year at my son’s school there are two days where grandparents or other “special friends” come to visit the students.   It’s a special time where the children get to show off what they’ve been doing during the year.   My parents are usually in town this time of year and would come one of the days.   My daughter attended the Montessori school until this year so my parents would spend half of the time with her and half of the time with my son.

This is exciting to the children.   Children love their grandparents and being able to have them in their classroom is a special thing.   For the second of the two days we’ve invited “special friends” of our honorary Uncle Jonathan and Margaret.   My son was ready for them this morning, looking forward to the day.

I volunteer in the mornings, giving a presentation to the guests on what a day in the life at Montessori school is like for the children.   Montessori school is a little different than traditional schools but we think it’s the best choice for our children (or child now as my daughter is at a school that has trained vision impairment teachers helping her).  

I like talking about what the children do.   I have posters with lots of classroom pictures on them with the children working.   The grandparents love to look for their grandchild in the photos while I talk about what “work cycle” is and what it means to be in Children’s House Extended Day and how the toddlers participate in making bread every day.  Oh, and flower arranging and leaf washing and other things that sound silly for a child to do but make perfect educational sense when you understand they why behind it.

Tomorrow my parents will come to see my son at school and watch him preform some songs with his classmates (which he was pretty excited about).  

Then, it’s spring break.   Both children are off next week and everyone is looking forward to that.

The Big Boy Update:  My daughter was doing a game where she’d say, “say your name if you like bananas” or other item.   We’d say or not say our name.   My son responded to one of her questions with the answer, “Grey”.   He told her, “I only like it a little bit, so I only said half of my name”.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  This is a bit graphic, so come back tomorrow if you don’t think you can handle it.   My daughter has had a rash and we’ve been putting some cream on her bottom and around her vagina for the past several days.   Today I came into the bedroom to find her with her pants off, trying to tell if the rash was still there.   I could tell one spot was bothering her so I asked if she wanted me to put on the medicine.   She did and when I came over she was craning forward to see.    She said, “it looks like the state fair.”   I tried not to laugh in surprise and asked her, “your vagina looks like the state fair?”  She said, “yes, it has red and white stripes.”   There were no stripes, but we don’t know what she can see or how things look.   She loves the state fair.   It would seem there were similarities.