Il Dylan: School days

Dylan is really starting to like school and to go willingly in the mornings - yeah! The first month was about as fun (for mom) as having a root canal every single morning of the week what with his crying, complaining, carrying on and refusal to get dressed and ready. Now he says "Look at me, mom. I'm NOT crying!" and skips out to the car. He is learning a lot (one day he said "Mom, did you know it was autumn?"), and is really making friends. The school is set up Montessori style, so his class has a table of 3-year-olds, a table of 4-year-olds and a table of 5-year-olds. He has a 5-year-old "big brother" who takes him to get a drink of water or into the nap room after lunch. A mom of one of the 5-year-olds told me that the "big kids" had a vote on who the least annoying 3-year-old was, and Dylan won since he is the one who cries the least.

His teacher lives across the street so often when I run into her she will tell me little anecdotes about how he is doing. She said that he is a child who pays a lot of attention to adults and what is going on around him. He is not "in his own world" and he processes everything he sees, hears and overhears. This is very true as lately when he gets frustrated playing with his cars, I sometimes will hear him say "dammit!" There is only one person he could have learned that from, and she will make a bigger effort not to say that word around him! Oops. The school nutritionist is a family friend and lives in the neighborhood. She has promised to put pasta al pesto back on the menu just for Dylan as he was getting tired of pasta al pomodoro and is not a big fan of ravioli, lasagna or baby pasta in broth. He loves risotto, however, and doesn't complain on risotto days.

In other news, we will have a new "addition" to the family come this Thursday!!! After much research, I have finally settled on a clothes dryer. It is not a "big, mega powerful American clothes dryer" but it should get the job done. I've only seen dryers here in the last few years, and they work via condensation (you have to dump out a tub of water after each load) so I'd heard mixed things about them. But the new generation of condensation dryers seems to work pretty well and be very energy efficient. We have limited power in our apartment so I had to find one that would only use about 1 kilowatt per cycle. The funny thing is that the dryer we decided on is the same model we had in our New York rental apartment this summer, so every time I use it, I'll feel like I'm back in the Big Apple, but with no bagels and less Bounce. The only space we have for it is in our entryway where we always meant to put a telephone table or a plant (but never did) so we are going to enclose it in something to make it appear to be an extension of our kitchen. Otherwise, the dryer would be the first thing you'd see upon entering our apartment, which actually would probably be fitting considering how much I've complained about doing laundry these last ten years!

Feeling mellow before school in flannel PJs from Grandma Mimi.

Before school we put our "little people" on the school bus and Dylan tells them "Don't be scared. The teachers are nice." He's making a funny face because he doesn't like his hat.