Preschool!

To follow up Kevin's elaborate boatschool/market posting, I thought I'd tell a little and share about what I've been up to. While I'm still working at the Science Center ( PacificScienceCenter.org ) on weekends teaching birthday parties, my main activity has been at University Baptist Childrens' Center, an extended preschool two blocks from our home. I love the commute, and the work is pretty fabulous. I always tell people I just play on the floor with little kids, though it's a little more complicated than that. I work about 30 hours a week now, going in at either 9:00 am or 2:00 pm, and always leaving at six. From 3:00 on, I'm usually with one-year-olds, and then I have some closing tasks making sure the center is ready to open the next day. If it's a longer day, I often spend the morning with the Unicorns (the official name of the 4-5 year-old classroom), doing crafts and reading books. Every day, it seems like, the kids are a little bigger and saying crazier things. My friend Gus who just moved up to the Butterfly room for 2 year olds, is an ongoing stream of funny affection, "flirting," and always greeting me with excitement. A month or so ago, he expressed a lot of frustration that I was already married, and still always asks other teachers where I am... It's pretty cute. We like to play a lot of pretend, and the kids are always trying to feed me plastic ethnic food of various kinds, which of course is always delicious.
It's been pretty wet and cold since we got back from the break, so most of our play is inside lately. Since the preschool is housed in a large brick church, there is a pretty nifty fellowship-hall type room which the kids call Social Hall, or Shoshal-all, depending on how old they are. On some days we are able to set up an indoor climbing structure with a slide and a few levels to play with:
A while ago I took the remainders of the bubble tubes from our wedding; the kids LOVE to have their own little tubes of bubbles, and some of the one-year-olds have amazing fine motor coordination, very carefully pulling the wands in and out of the tubes and blowing a good stream of bubbles. Others are less curious about the process and more interested in the taste.

Toward the end of the day, I often have an hour or two with five or six kids and another teacher, Whitney. She has always been sort of the school fixture for art-learning and designed the art-studio on our main level. So we have fun together, pulling off the kids' shirts and setting them free with tempura, chalk, bingo-dabbers, pastels, and every color of paper. It's pretty incredible what they come up with sometimes, and I'm always bringing home scraps of things we played with to make books with later. My book-making stack is about to eat the couch. Needless to say, I'm really enjoying my work. Kevin asked the other day if I was happy with it and if it was fulfilling. I only thought a minute before answering, "Definitely!" I'm learning so much about children and parenting- while it does make me really look forward to having our own kids and being able to make all of the important developmental decisions with them and work with them, I am really happy to just be getting training and practice that is so tangibly relevant to what we want to do with our lives.

As an amendment to a previous post: it came to my attention that my reference to angora rabbits, etc., in the middle of the paragraph about Daddy's book Could be interpreted as a complaint about it being boring. Let me assure the public: that was not at all what I meant. Since the book was about business (and I'm thinking particularly about a chapter that focused a lot on home business), and the people that you do business, upkeep of that community, etc., I meant rather that it helped me think about the business of raising angora rabbits for making angora yarns, which Kevin and I have played with the idea of lately, and the people on Vashon Island who would be our immediate business community when/if we manage to move there. Sorry for not drawing that connection very well. Yeah. So I need to get the web address for the site where you can check out the book. It's still in pre-sale, but I sent the manuscript out this morning after a little trouble getting it off my computer, and it should come out soon here! Shannon, the contributing editor, asked about my "rates," and said she'd passed the information to a student with another proofreading need, so I made some up, and who knows? Maybe I'll do some more of that kind of thing in the future. I definitely enjoyed getting to take time reading Daddy's book closely, and if I were doing a good chunk of proofreading I'd be able to schedule quite a lot of reading. It could be fun.

Out for now- have a great long weekend!