Stinky Diapers

Five Fat Turkeys Are WEEEEEEEEEE

Last night H-Bomb's preschool had its annual Thanksgiving dinner for the kids and their families. The food is always delish, and it's great to hang out with the other parents for longer than the two minutes it takes to get your kid's coat on and sign them out.  Entertainment is traditionally provided by the 4K class, and this year it was the Bomber's turn.   The 3K class was the opening act, and then the Bomber's class performed two Thanksgiving classics - "I'm Thankful For" and "Five Fat Turkeys."  At the end, we all waved our lighters and called for an encore, but they told us union rules prevented them from keeping the roadies too much longer. (Okay, that last part may not be entirely accurate.) I did manage to score bootleg video from inside the concert hall.

This was actually the second song, but I liked it better, so I'm putting it first:

Five Fat Turkeys on Vimeo.

  This song got off to a rocky start, but the teacher dragged them all back on track and they managed to finish big:

I'm Thankful For on Vimeo.

 

 

Another Milestone Reached Already

Our first parent-teacher conference. Frankly, it seems a little silly to be having a conference about my four year old's educational progress to date, but the preschool is big on this stuff, so we go along.

The Bomber has two teachers, both of whom are awesome, and one of whom he had last year as well, which is nice from a continuity standpoint, and also good because I like her, specifically.  It was a little serendipitous, actually, because he started the year with two other teachers, one of whom was a serious hottie - sort of a cross between Matthew McConaughey in Sahara and Josh Lucas in Sweet Home Alabama. He left to take a job in a public school helping special needs children, which I think is really selfish of him. What about my needs, huh?  But I digress....

Anyway,  the point is (yes, there's a point people, stay with me), the teacher he had last year, Ms. C, just happened to be coming back from maternity leave when all this resigning and leaving was going on in the Bomber's classroom, so it worked out nicely that she came back to a position she really wanted anyway, right at the time they needed her. 

So, as I was saying somewhere up there, we had our parent-teacher conference with Ms. C and she brought her baby, who started life as 32 week preemie and is now a snuggly, adorable, happy four month old.  She let me hold him during the conference. And he smelled good, and was all warm and lovey and cooing. And I gave him his bottle, and he did that cute thing with his tongue and made sweet little faces and waved his tiny arms and legs. mmm.... baby......

Wait, was I talking about something?  Oh yeah, the Bomber's conference... um... I think it was good, I don't know, you'll have to ask Larry - did I mention the snuggly-wuggly baby I got to hold?

Seriously, it was pretty much what I expected, though it's still nice to hear it from someone else.  The Bomber is a generally good, obedient, easy-going child, though he does have his "moments" and he is easily wound up by the bigger kids.  This, in my opinion, is the best you can hope for with a barely four year old boy in a class where the other boys are all five or about to turn five, and it's always going to be that way, so we might as well get used to dealing with that now. 

From an educational standpoint, his work is way ahead of where he should be, and ahead of most of the other kids. His writing is apparently excellent (I say apparently, because it's hard for me to judge what a four year old's handwriting is *supposed* to look like - his looks pretty rough to me), his word recognition and reading skills are out of control, and he's really really good with numbers, patterns and mathematics.  That last doesn't surprise me at all - my father and my nephew are both mathematically gifted, his paternal grandfather was an accountant, and he's been showing a definite mathematical bent since he was really little.

In short, he's no longer a teeny, snuggly little baby, but I still think he's pretty great.

Next Stop, NASCAR

Every year since the Bomber was a little over two years old, he's accompanied his preschool class to the South Carolina state fair.  The first year, they were so little, there wasn't a whole lot for them to do. We looked at some animals, and then they rode a few rides  that were small enough for two year olds.  There are, however, very few rides that are actually small enough for kids as little as he and some of his classmates were at two, so we put them on a few rides that were possibly a bit questionable.

One ride, the race cars, looked like it would be okay at first glance, but it turned out to have a short slow part followed by a quick turn around the end of the track.  The Bomber was not entirely impressed by the turn, although his classmate had a blast:

In fact, when he got off he told me he never wanted to go on that ride again.  A year, a few inches and a LOT of confidence later, though, he decided he wanted to try it again:

That's his "wheeeee" face. The car wasn't moving yet - he was just practising. He liked it much better the second time around.  His classmate (the same one as last year) was practising her "ho hum, this is old hat" face, I think.

This year, in the week or so leading up to the field trip, all he talked about were those race cars.  His classmate ditched him for another girl in their class, so he ended up with a random fair kid, but he didn't seem to mind. In fact, he was having such a good time, he actually took his hand off the bar to high-five Random Fair Kid:

It's fun to look at how he's changed over the last few years, but it's also a little sad to realize that in a few years he'll have outgrown the kiddie rides altogether, and be on to bigger and better things. But at least for now, he's still my little race car driver:

 

 

The Real Reason Dinosaurs Are Extinct

These days H-Bomb is really into dinosaurs.  He watches Dinosaur Train, has a multitude of books on dinosaurs, and has acquired a good-sized collection of toy dinosaurs. He can name  a huge number of different dinosaurs and their features, and can explain what those features are for. 

For example, tyrannosaurus rex had several rows of long teeth to help him eat his dinner, which is usually made up of other dinosaurs.  Ankylosaurus, on the other hand, had bony plates and a spiked tail to help him avoid his creditors.  When asked to describe the purpose of a triceratops frill, or give the reason that ornithomimus runs so fast, my child will invariably tell you it was to avoid their creditors. 

And then one day, some slick lawyer dinosaur probably came along and convinced them that a numbered account in the Caymans was a better bet, and before long they stopped swinging their spiked tails or using their camoflauge, and some giganotosaurus came along and ate them. And the slick lawyer dino, too. Then with nothing to eat and no way to access the off-shore account, the meat-eaters died out too.  And that, my friends, is what really happened to the dinosaurs. You heard it from the Bomber first.

Halloween, Part 5

Last year, right after Halloween (like four minutes after he got home from trick-or-treating) the Bomber declared his intention to be a ghost next Halloween.  This is a problem, because the kid goes to preschool at a Baptist church and Baptists do not, apparently, celebrate Halloween. They do, however, celebrate fall by putting on a festival on a day close to Halloween, at which the children dress up and are given candy. (Yeah, I know.) Anyway, costumes at this not-a-Halloween-celebration cannot be anything supernatural - among the list of the verboten: witches, ghouls, vampires and.... ghosts. But he was three, and I figured that by October 31, 2010, he'd have been through at least a few costume choices. 

Naturally, the child stuck to his guns for 11 months, until finally in September I had to break it to him that he couldn't be a ghost at school, and I wasn't assembling two different costumes for him. (I'm mean like that.) After much negotiation, we decided instead on pirate, since thanks to his Aunt Peg he already had a complete set of pirate accoutrements, including a sword, a hook, an eye patch, a hat, an earring, and some pirate booty.  (But not Pirate's Booty, which in my opinion would have been better.)  As it turned out, this was a fortuitious choice, since two of his buddies that we invited over for trick-or-treating in our neighborhood also decided to be pirates.

So here's my little pirate in a pensive moment:

Here's the merry band of pirates (they look like they're plotting something, don't they?)

The one with the big hat was apparently elected captain, but the sweet looking one with the cork-screw curls was really in charge.  

Pirates, meet princess:

Now they're ready for trick-or-treating, er... I mean, plundering:

The fourth member of their group was dressed as Scooby-Doo, which gave the whole evening the air of a bad 70s cartoon. I kept expecting one of them to say "And I would have gotten away with it, too,  if it wasn't for those meddling kids."

And as it turns out, they weren't the only ones dressed up as pirates. Little pirates? Meet BIG pirate: