October 08, 2003 - 7:07 p.m.

My Little Handful

B, my youngest charge, is a total ham. I occasionally call him my "song and dance man" as he loves to make up his own songs to sing and skips and dances around the house a lot. Yesterday, while he was showering, he was singing away. Most of it seemed his usual mix of nonsense and familiar preschool song lyrics. Then I noticed he had started singing "The Hokey Pokey", so I listened a little closer. To my great amusement, he sang, "You put your penis in. You put your penis out. You put your penis in and you shake it all about." I cracked up!

Alas, not all of B's antics are so innocent and amusing. Remember the bathroom incident? Apparently, today at school, B asked the same classmate to "go in the bathroom and do bathroom things." This is the third time this sort of thing has happened now, and the director of the preschool is not too happy. Each time we have had lengthy discussions with B about the rules at school, privacy of bodies, etc. It seems our lectures and entreaties have fallen upon deaf ears. So B's parents get to meet with the director Friday morning, and we are keeping him home from school tomorrow. He'll have to accompany me on errands, play by himself, and do without TV, swingset, bike, etc. Hopefully the dreariness of the day without his friends and without entertaining activities and projects with me will convince him to shape up before we have to switch him into a different class or, worse yet, school.

It's a tough situation, because it's hard to disassociate the real issue from the feeling that it reflects badly on us, his caregivers. Also, the behavior is basically an extreme manifestation of several normal preschool behaviors: body curiosity, limit testing, and experimentation with social roles and influence. It figures that B, who is an entirely unsubtle creature, would manage to exhibit well accepted childhood psychology in an unacceptable way. Meanwhile, his mom is on a business trip and is stressing out from afar about the issue. She left a meeting today only to be greeted by an email about today's incident from the school director! Tomorrow should be an interesting day as I deal with a young one who is essentially under house arrest. I will probably need all the patience I can muster!

In the meantime, tonight I will be watching the Red Sox take on the Evil Empire in game one of the ALCS. Go Sox!

Audition update: the website for the theater company now says to expect the cast list to be posted Sunday. I really don't get how it can take so long! It seems to me the decisions would be harder longer after the audition. If I were a director I would want to figure out my cast pretty much immediately while their voices, skills, and faces were still fresh in my mind. Alas, I am not a director, so I will just have to wait and try not to bite my nails.

today's project: game on!

musing about: how to tame a recalcitrant preschooler

�

flutter back - fly ahead