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.