Fun Sunday morning activity
I met with Dylan's teachers last night to get an idea of how he is doing at school. They didn't tell me much I don't already know about my son: 1) he's a thumbsucker, and they spend all day saying "Dylan take your thumb out of your mouth." Even the kids tell him to take his thumb out of his mouth all the time. Think of all the germs he's putting in his mouth. Great! 2) he barely eats anything (there goes my $7 per day for well-balanced organic meals) and 3) he talks well for his age and talks a lot. The teacher said that some kids at 3 are still a little hard to understand, but he enunciates really well and speaks conversationally in full sentences. I think this is especially true of his Italian. His English probably needs more work, especially in the pronunciation department.
I told the teacher that sometimes when I drop him off in the morning I notice that instead of going to sit at the table where the other kids are drawing, he will go do something by himself in the toy corner, and it breaks my heart a little. I sometimes watch him through the window to see if he will go play with the other kids but he's a little bit of a "lone wolf." She said that he is one of the youngest in the class (they are 3-,4 and 5-year-olds) and that it's normal that he is not into drawing at this age, and that boys typically don't like drawing as much as girls anyway. She said that the girls in his class are very clique-ish and "little gossips" who don't want the boys sitting at the table while they are having their conversations. hee hee. She put my mind at ease because I was feeling that while he is an intelligent kid, maybe he's lacking somewhere in the social department, but I guess that's not the case and it's just this age.
It was nice to find out about the projects they are working on at school and see what they are doing. Sometimes he mentions things in passing, but it's hard to get the full picture from a 3-year-old. They are currently studying "pollution," which is why now every time we take the car Dylan says "Mom, you know the car pollutes? It spits smoke!" I love that he is getting in touch with the environment, but I remember back in my day we sang songs about, uh, trees, grass and lambs. They are learning songs about smog and exhaust and drawing ominous pictures of cars with gray smoke coming out the back. Kind of disturbing actually. His favorite day at school is Friday because they go to the school library and he gets to pick a new book for the week. There was one week where we forgot to bring back the book from the previous week, which meant he didn't get to pick a new one, and that was tragic, to say the least. When I went to pick him up he was crying because the other kids were leaving school with their "new" books and he didn't get to pick one that week.
Well, here's some big news: Dylan has recently begun to sleep through the night (sort of and in his own way). His eczema has not been that bad lately, which means he is much less restless. He goes to bed in his own bed, but then in the middle of the night (usually around 1 a.m. - that's a typical wake-up time for him), he comes into our bed and lately he's been doing it without waking us up. That means WE have slept through the night. Honestly, I feel like I could scale Everest. How we ever went three years+ without sleeping is beyond me. Now that I'm sleeping undisturbed, I only need, like, 5 hours of sleep. In fact, it's 6 a.m here and I've been up for an hour. I naturally wake up because my body doesn't understand why it isn't being woken up. Let's hope this continues. Everyone (well everyone who ever had a kid who didn't sleep and knew what we were going through) told us that three years would be a turning point. I hope it is!
