Please write five words describing your kindergartener.
I stare at these words. I am completely stumped! What can I say about my younger son, M, that will not get our family flagged for some kind of urgent psychological intervention? Cute? Devious? Unhygienic? I can’t just put weird, although, really, it’s the obvious choice. This is the child who, six months after the school Easter party, is still carrying around a green plastic Easter egg shell containing a smashed cotton ball named “Chickie.” Chickie’s construction-paper eyes and beak fell off months ago, and it has spent more than one rainy night outside. Chickie is now so disgusting that my husband started putting it on a high shelf to dry out–only to find a heartbroken M staring up at the shelf, his thumb in his mouth. When I brought home a bag of new fluffy white cotton balls, M yelled: “For CHICKIE!!!” and raced to get the eggshell. Not only did we repair the original Chickie, we made several more—Eggy, Beaky and Peepy!
A neighbor, seeing M carefully setting Chickie in a safe place before getting on the trampoline, asked if he was taking care of the egg for a school project.
“Um, no,” I said. “It’s a…personal choice.”
Maybe these are the five best words to describe my kindergartener:
1). Curious. M is nothing if not curious. He can go for hours asking us our favorite colors, our favorite drinks, our favorite states, our favorite foods, etc. When Grandpa took M on an overnight campout and I asked how bedtime went, my dad said: “Well, I had the little nipper in bed at eight, but then he kept me up ‘til 11 pm asking me about my favorite color!” Sometimes my husband gives fake answers just to make M mad. “Dad! Your favorite color can’t be brown because last time it was light pink!”
2) Patient. Or maybe…laid-back? Mellow? Whatever is the opposite of “moves fast.” Sometimes, we sit in the car for a good ten minutes waiting for M to finish buckling his car seat. His older brother, who could definitely be described as a fast mover, usually spends the whole ten minutes screaming in frustration. My friends tell me I baby M, and I know they’re right. He’s so darn cute, with those big green eyes! But it’s a vicious cycle: it’s hard not to step in and do things for M when he moves at the pace of a lazy, dehydrated snail. One night, after M’s bath, I decided to see how long it would take him to get out of the tub if I wasn’t reminding him. I sat back and waited. M raised one dripping foot—could it be that easy?—but then lowered it.
“Mom! The soap is still wet! Mom! It has bubbles on it! Mom! It’s on the bottom of the tub! Mom! If you step on it you could fall down! Mom! My Bear hit his head and fell down on the soap. Mom! What is your favorite kind of soap?”
By the time we got around to exploring to how many shapes we could fold the washcloth into, it had been 37 minutes since the water had drained out of the tub. M finally got out of the tub when he was so cold he was turning blue.
3) Dramatic has to be next on the list, although it is definitely not an adjective any teacher wants to hear. M is the child who, when banished to his room for kicking his brother, scratching his name into the door of my new car with a rock, or ink-stamping the couch, runs into his room, slams the door, and screams, “I hate you ten times faw-evah!” Maybe I could take him more seriously if he didn’t still talk like a Muppet. The speech therapist swears he is perfectly ready for kindergarten, but I have my doubts. M sometimes starts playing the harmonica from behind his closed bedroom door. We call it the Time Out Blues.
4) Creative. M assigns supplemental characteristics, including speed and temperature, to every color, and every variant of every color! He can also reel off a complicated back story for every one of his four hundred stuffed animals. Each one, ranging from “Kitty”, a small, battered white cat who possibly came out of a vending machine, to “Cutie the Penguin,” has a detailed history and a complex set of relationships with all the other animals. M is constantly correcting me when I try to remember them all: “No, Mom, Skitty is a girl, and and Snakey is Bear’s grandfather, not his brother!” M’s creativity comes in handy when there are events in the house that need explaining: “Dad, Bear dropped the toilet paper roll in the toilet. It got soggy. It’s really, really big now.” Dad sighs, “Bear did that? Can you please tell Bear to pull it out right away next time?”That darn Bear!
(Since this technique seems to work so well for Mac, my husband appropriates the strategy for himself. He comes home late one day and informs me gravely that Bear got a speeding ticket on the way home! “Bear should not have been driving so fast and messing with his phone at the same time,” I say. It’s hard to be mad at a teddy bear. We are waiting for the day when we get the midnight phone call: “Mom! Bear got arrested. You need to come pick him up!”)
5) And finally, M is very, very determined. When he wants his way, watch out. When M wanted to switch seats with his brother right in the middle of breakfast for absolutely no reason and his brother refused, it triggered a long, long, long, tantrum. M ended up in the time-out chair screaming the same word over and over: “MOM!!!”
It took watching several episodes of Supernanny for me to realize: “OMG! I am just as lame as those people on television who had to call Supernanny!” My long–suffering husband has been telling me this for years: “M manipulates you like Play-doh, honey. ” Hopefully, M’s kindergarten teacher will manage him much better than I am capable of. This is why my children attend school, with professionals! I wish his teacher all the luck in the world.
Jesseca Timmons’ younger son, now a college student, did not get expelled from kindergarten.