Preschool Rules!
In case you haven’t heard, the Vancouver Civic strike is over, which means I have been able to return in recent weeks to the tot gym with Eleanor. Don’t get me wrong, the tot gym is great–all the tricycles and sliding boards I don’t have the money or room for, for the low low price of $2.50 a visit! But, yesterday I tried out the family center’s drop-in preschool for the first time and now I’m kicking myself for not taking Eleanor there sooner. And, it wasn’t even closed during the strike (but I bet it was busy busy busy)!
Neighborhood moms had told me a while back about this place where you could go with your kid to play and do crafts. At first, I pooh-poohed getting out and about at 9 in the morning, but fortunately, the end of day light savings time has us in early-bird mode around here (well, it’s either get up an hour earlier to preserve our peaceful mornings without Eleanor or wake up with her and rush rush rush, ’cause she doesn’t seem to get that she could be sleeping in). I assumed I would be asked to at least purchase some kind of membership or pay some dues for the privilege of using their facilities, their paint and craft supplies, their toys and playground. Oh, and there’s free coffee! What does it all cost? A banana!
No lie. A banana is what I paid. Every parent brings a piece of fruit that gets cut up and split amongst all the kids at snack time. But, first comes play time! There were kids playing house in one corner, dress-up in another. There was a paint station with several easels beside the playdough table and a crafts table (where Eleanor got glue in her hair). There was a jungle gym were she first tested her strength hanging from the monkey bars and lasted a few seconds before dropping safely to the mat below. For older kids (like 3- and 4-year-olds) there were games and puzzles. Play time was absolute mayhem! They say the afternoon session is much quieter.
After play time came singing, for which Eleanor didn’t really want to sit still. She’s never had to learn a time for this and a time for that, since I pretty much follow her schedule at home. Anyway, she cried briefly because I wouldn’t let her run off to the bi-dah (the slide), but she got over it and got excited when she saw one of the nice ladies bringing around plates of fruit. Yay snack time!
Oh, and the ladies that work there are sooooooo nice! They did a great job of making me feel welcome as a first-timer and introduced me around (although I recognized a few moms and caretakers from other neighborhood programs and playgrounds). And–get this–since there are paid attendants present, once Eleanor gets more familiar with the place and the people, I’ll be able to leave her in the preschool while I go downstairs and have a coffee in the lounge! For the cost of a single piece of fruit!
I’d like to say thank you to the Canadian federal government and the city government of Vancouver for this wonderful service!
An Eleanor Update
My little smartie pants can now strings words together to communicate a whole idea or to tell me a story. The other day at the tot gym Eleanor got upset because some older kids (we’re talking three-year-olds here) wouldn’t let her play in the block house they had built. I was watching this from the bench on the other side of the gymnasium, so I had some reference for when she came over to me and said, crying, “Mommy… Allie… set… ment… chirdet… hows.” Translation: “Mommy, I’m sad and I’m mad at those children that won’t let me play in the house.” Good girl!
Well, we didn’t have to wait long before the big kids were done playing with the blocks and I started to build a new block house just for Eleanor. Unfortunately, it also wasn’t long before some other children wanted to play in our house and, though they kind of took over, I couldn’t very well send them away or condone Eleanor pushing them away. I didn’t want to show Eleanor that what the bigger kids had done to her earlier was the right thing to do. And, of course, I didn’t want to make the little kids “set” and “ment!”
Globalization and Grandmas
These days, especially in Vancouver, it seems just about everyone I know is from somewhere else. In fact, Eleanor is one of the only Vancouverites I know to actually be born here. Since moving to Vancouver, I have met people from all over the world. I used to joke that the bakery where I was working was Canadian-owned but internationally-operated since employees came from places as scattered as the Philippines, Japan, Bosnia, England, the US, and Mexico. This state of affairs is probably exaggerated in Vancouver, as it is a world-class port city, but it is by no means unique to Vancouver. Moving all over the world, or at least across a continent, is a pretty common occurrence in this era of globalization.
Of course, it wasn’t always like this. Presumably, people didn’t move far from home because they lacked the opportunity or the means to do so. But, I know better. This whole experience of raising a child far from home and family has really made me see the value of grandmas!
When I was a kid, my family was only a thirty-minute car ride from my grandparents’ house. I used to think it was so cool that my brother and I could visit so often, even for trips of a week or more in the summertime. I figured my mom was being really nice to allow us this privilege. Now, I know better: she didn’t do it for us; she wanted some time to herself!
This childcare thing is relentless, especially when you don’t make use of a nanny or daycare. Yes, believe it or not, Stephen and I take full responsibility for Eleanor 24/7. What we really need is a grandma or two. Some grandpas would be nice, too. And, maybe even an aunt or an uncle.
Someone should come up with a meet-up service to match lonely parents in need of a break with lonely empty-nesters whose own children and grandchildren live far away like us. I’m thinking “Rent-a-Granny” or “Grandma for a Day” or some such business idea. Any takers?
Diaper Free… Well, Mostly
When I tell people that Eleanor is pretty much potty-trained at only twenty months of age, they invariably want to know what I’ve done to achieve this. Well, it’s not so much what I’ve done, but what I haven’t done that’s made it possible. Quite simply, I haven’t given root to the false, yet extremely common (for the under-two crowd), belief that you should use your pants as a toilet. Put another way, I have simply tried to raise Eleanor knowing what the potty is for even when she couldn’t use it or tell me she had to go.
To this end, Eleanor has been “toileting” in a more appropriate place at every opportunity since she was five weeks old. At first, it was the sink, although I’ve heard tell of people who keep plastic bowls or buckets near the newborn-family bed for night work. We purchased the smallest plastic potty we could find as soon as she was big enough to sit up steady on it. By “every opportunity,” I simply mean whenever I happened to get the sense that she needed, or was about, to go; obviously, it’s easier to tell in the beginning with a no. two, so we actually achieved diaper-free no. twos about eight weeks before the recent successes with no. ones. Often it happened that I made the assumption her diaper would be wet, given how long it had been since the previous change; upon removal, the diaper would prove to be dry and I would simply hold her over the sink or sit her on the potty to see if she had to go.
For many months, maybe the whole first year we were doing this, it was simply an exercise on my part, lacking any recognition or understanding on hers. But, by consistently showing her how it’s done–and without any real encouragement or pressure–she simply came to know that using the actual toilet is the way toileting is done. And why shouldn’t she have learned that from the beginning? It came completely naturally to her, I think in no small part due to the fact that she was never given the opportunity to learn otherwise, but also because she was equipped for it all along. The potty, for E, was not this strange seat that entered her life on her second birthday (or third or fourth) and gave occasion to her parents to get angry with her or become frustrated with her for not understanding what they wanted her to do. I truly think that Eleanor has done as much at every stage to recognize needing to go, communicating that need, and then doing the deed as she was physically and mentally able to do at the time.
In the last week, something must have clicked. The whole process is mentally and physically there. She’s now going for entire days at a time wearing diapers but never wetting them. She even wears panties around the house sometimes. (She’s so skinny, though, the loss of all that bulk means falls hurt more and her pants are huge.)
Contrary to what I stated above about it being easier to pick up on the no. two cues, so to speak, this whole diaper-free enterprise actually arose because of five-week old Eleanor’s thankfully-short-lived habit of grunting when she had to pee at night. Several nights in a row, she kept me awake for at least an hour grunting as if she was trying to go in her sleep. Each night, when I got her up and took her to the bathroom to change her, I discovered a dry diaper. Each night, the dry diaper was soon followed by a wet diaper and a wet counter. Since she wasn’t get any wear out of these diapers, it seemed a waste that I should still have to toss it in the diaper pail. I figured, every diaper I kept out of the diaper pail meant I could go a little bit longer without having to wash and fold a load of cloth diapers.
Wait: rewind a few months to the pregnancy workshop I attended at a local community center. The discussion leaders that night were Hope and Bonnie, the two-woman doula team that taught the pre-natal class I signed up for post-workshop. They were a little out there in an earth-mother-love kinda way, which is cool, but they had some kinda “out there” pregnancy and childcare books arrayed on the table, one of which caught my eye: Diaper Free, Naturally! or something like that. That’s where I first came across the ideas and methods described above, as well as some shocking data showing that the age at which “toilet-training” (a modern idea, by the way) typically begins, has risen steadily during the decades since the inception of disposable diapering (which I never would have considered even if I knew my kid could never be housebroken). Diaper companies keep making larger sizes, more specialized fits for active toddlers, and now Goodnites for bed-wetting older children. With the addition of adult diapers for the incontinent (probably just the same companies, different names), diaper makers pretty much have you for life. What’s next? Disposable underwear?
Fast-forward. So, on the fourth night, knowing that Eleanor would soon let loose all over the counter, I decided to save a diaper and hold her over the sink. I was struck by how easy the diaper-free approach really could be and I just kept doing it one diaper at a time. She was only five weeks old when we started and her floppy head posed a challenge for getting her into position, but with practice I figured out how to grasp her under the thighs and rest her head between my arms. And, best of all, the grunting stopped and I could get back to my then-favorite past-time: sleep!
