Jadzia’s first day of preschool

!http://www.joshrenaud.com/family/archives/images/2010-08/IMG_3840.jpg!

There is no doubt we have a smart little five-year-old (five as of yesterday, anyway).

From an early age she has shown a love of being read to, and now she has a love of reading and writing for herself. Sometimes her writings require an interpreter since she doesn’t use vowels, but still she impresses us frequently.

We had hoped to send Jadzia to kindegarten this year. From an academic standpoint, she is definitely ready. But even from the social side, I think she is ready, too. But she was born too late in August to satisfy the state of Missouri.

The remaining options were: keep her at home, send her to preschool, or send her to a private kindergarten.

We decided to give a preschool a try. Classes are three hours, three days a week.

We had registered for it early in the year and were told developmental screenings would be held in August. Off we went to Bolivia. When we got back into town, we had three increasingly-desperate-sounding messages waiting for us from the screening lady, trying to set up an appointment.

Preschool had actually already started. After Jadzia finished the screening, the lady told us to expect a call from a teacher this week.

Miss Katie called us yesterday to let us know Jadzia would be in her class (it’s actually at McCluer HS), and we were welcome to start Wednesday (the next day) if we wanted to. Why not?

Jadzia, of course, was very excited. She took a bath Tuesday night, picked out some clothes for the next day, and set aside her black bear backpack.

We got up early to eat breakfast, then I took Jadzia in the minivan. We ended up getting to the class a little early, so we sort of putzed around playing legos and looking at stuff in the hallway. Jadzia saw the lockers with names, and was looking forward to getting one with her own name.

When the door opened, Jadzia came in and sat down at a coloring table where she was giving a little book/packet with her name on it. I talked a bit with the teacher, then gave Jadzia a kiss and headed out.

We all spent the rest of the morning eating some breakfast, then doing some errands. Yoli drove all of us to the Jennings Target (no crashes or incidents!), then I drove us up to Florissant to use Yoli’s 50% off Michael’s coupons.

!http://www.joshrenaud.com/family/archives/images/2010-08/IMG_3841.jpg!

!http://www.joshrenaud.com/family/archives/images/2010-08/IMG_3843.jpg!

When we came back to McCluer, we found a happy girl. She had a lot of fun in her class, Jadzia said. (At first she spoke to us with a little bit of attitude, which reminded me of myself back in the day. We had to break her of that habit right away.)

Then she told us about her time spent listening to stories, painting, having a recess time, sharing food with classmates at snack time, etc. Seems like preschool is going to be a lot of fun.

One other thing – It didn’t take long for peer pressure (or peer conformance or whatever) to set in. Jadzia told us that all the other kids had different sorts of backpacks from her, and that everyone else had a lunch box. Of course she wanted things just like theirs. Yoli pointed out that there were probably some kids who went home and said “Hey, there was a new girl in class today who had a *BEAR* backpack!”