Again with the Daycare-Related Post

Thanks to all who gave me their thoughts on the situation described in the previous post. I have thought about things a lot, and I think I am overreacting. The teachers really have been nothing but nice when I'm around, despite having a crazy bunch of little guys to ride herd on. So what if the voice volume is a little higher?

I still have some concerns, though. The main one is that Naomi, normally a fan of school, has said every day either that she wants to be in the other class, or that she doesn't want to go to school at all. This is probably normal considering that she's getting to the age where she has figured out that she doesn't always want the same things for herself as the things that are frequently thrust upon her. School is thrust upon her every day, so it's not surprising that she has started to have something to say about it. On the other hand, wah!

It's hard to hear that she is not as happy now as she has been in the past.Her first transition, from the baby class to the teeny toddler class, was hardest on me. I actually cried on her last day, and made ridiculous personalized presents for the teachers so they would never forget my kid. Ha. For her part, Naomi talked about her old teachers a lot, but she seemed to really like being in the new class, and playing on all the great new playground equipment, and doing the songs and activities that went along with being a slightly bigger kid. For some reason this second transition, to the two-year-old class, is harder on her. She is the littlest in the class, one of very few girls. And I know she misses her teachers from the teeny toddler class, who were very sweet to her. Even so, it was clear for the last few weeks she was in that class that it was time to move up. There was a new influx of tinies from the baby class, and seeing all of them together made me realize that it was going to get frustrating and boring for her (am I really saying this?).

My other concern, which may or may not be related to the main concern, is that I've heard Naomi say a few things to her animals, usually when she is putting them down for a nap (a favorite past time), that were a little surprising. "Get that head down!" "Look in my eyes, you hear me?!" Yipes. This makes me think that naptime in the new class is not as relaxing as it should be.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will relate that I spent a year as a preschool teacher. My class was the "young 4's." Man, were they cute. The place that I worked had a very yelly head teacher, and she set the tone for how we interacted with the kids. This was particularly bad for me, as I can be a wimpy chameleon in work and social situations, so there were times when I got yelly too. Frequently, at naptime, I was determined that all my charges would sleep if I had to give myself a stroke making it happen. I am sure I said "Get that head down!" or worse tothese little ones. The result was that a bunch of kids that were probably developmentally ready to stop napping developed the ability to lie still and quiet for an hour or more in the middle of the day. Not necessarily the most useful skill outside of a monastery, but there you are.

Right. So getting all worked up over hearing Naomi bring home nap-coercion techniques that are (I promise) not learned from her parents feels on the one hand like my job as a mom, and on the other hand like a certain pot casting aspersions on a certain kettle. It is not going to be the first time that Naomi picks up something we're not crazy about. And the next time she does, rather than looking at Jim with horror and saying, did I just hear her right?! I will talk to her about using kind words with her animals, and with people. In the meantime I will ruminate endlessly about this very long test that is constantly being administered to me, wherein I have to decide whether to continue doing everything in my power to protect and shield my child within a world that is endlessly safe and kind and loving, or whether (and how quickly) I have to accept that she is part of the actual world, and everything that goes along with that. How lucky for her and for me that our version of the actual world is still so safe and kind and loving. Not so, in so many other places.

Old Yeller

Naomi is in a daycare that I really like. The facility is not too big, not corporate, nice setting, secular, calm, kind, good teacher to kid ratio, etc. Recently she moved up into the slightly bigger tiny kid class (she's almost two!), and now has two new teachers. They also seem kind and caring. Here's the sticking point: one of them is a yeller. She speaks in a normal-to-loud voice to me, but when she addresses the kids, it is all yelling all the time. I don't mean to say that she is mean (when I am there), I just mean to say that she is LOUD. Given that the classroom is propotionately small, even with a busy play buzz going on, you would only have to raise your voice just a bit to be heard at the other end. But when she is right in front of us, when we arrive in the morning, she says hello to me, and then she shouts HELLO to Naomi (who occasionally cowers back into my leg).

Naomi is at an age where she is just starting to understand the concept of rules. She says them back to us all the time, even things we said three weeks ago, sort of off the cuff, that normally we wouldn't think we would need to make an actual rule around ("We don't lick the couch. The couch is not for licking."). This is exciting in a way, because it feels like she recognizes the need to think about her behavior and what effect it will have. It's a little bit discomfiting as well, though, because it shows us how often we are decreeing, and about what ludicrous household minutiae. Yikes. Because it seems like she is starting to sort out her response to authority and internalizing some of it, and also simply because my gut tells me that a loud and shouty environment is perhaps not the ideal one for any kid to spend long hours in, I am uncomfortable with the fact that her authority figure and primary caregiver in the daytime hours displays the "American talking to a foreigner" behavior each and every day.

Which leads me to a fork in the road. Do I accept it's not that big of a deal, and just concentrate on teaching Naomi the difference between an inside voice and an outside voice on my own time, hoping for no hearing damage while she's in this class for the next six months? Or do I say something? If I say something, whom do I say it to? It would take a lot of courage to say something directly to the teacher herself. The alternative is to say something to the administrator (although I believe the owner is off having a baby this week). But unless I convince the person I talk to about this not to mention my name in connection with the feedback, that would mean the teacher knows who the feedback is coming from. My fear, of course, is that she might then see Naomi differently from the rest of the kids, or treat her differently than she did before she found out my opinion of her pipes.

I have read other daycare dilemmas on message boards, and I remember some angry retorts from caregivers who claim that they would never, ever treat a child any differently because of something a parent said or did. I want to believe that. But I know how people are. If you feel resentment, which a person might if they were told that they have a big giant mouth, you tend to let it out somehow.

Now I am flashing back to Crucial Conversations, a book I had to read back when I was in the lowest rungs of management (rungs I let go of, dropping gracefully back where I started). The authors talked about a common mistake people make, which is assuming what I seem to remember them calling "the sucker's choice." This makes it hard for people to deal with a situation because they think there are only two choices- in my case, say nothing, or say something and risk alienating the person who takes care of my kid. But maybe there is a third way? Maybe I can tell the teacher that Naomi has been shouting more at home (which she has a bit), and that we don't shout at home (we really don't, barring the occasional call to another room), and that I was thinking perhaps it was due to the fact that there are so many boys in her class (in Naomi's new class, girls are outnumbered five to one. This is a good ratio to get used to if she ever decides to follow in her mom's footsteps and get a job at a software company...). See how I assume the mantle of sexism and take the teacher out of it completely? I could ask if she would mind just practicing quiet, inside voices with them a few times a day, and see if Naomi adds this to her list of a thousand rules. Could this work?

I can't resist adding here that Naomi has made a verb of the word "loud" and has created a rule out of it, a simple one - "No louding." Ha! Maybe if that rule has already taken hold, we really don't have anything to worry about. No amount of shrilling and louding from Ms. Yelly will shake it loose!

Your Personal Penguin

Although Naomi very much likes both the book and the song (shout-out to gift bestowers C & B!), and although I admit to being surprised by how much better the song is than I suspected it was going to be, and although I am glad to know that Davey Jones is still getting work, still I
can't help wondering if it was a mistake to download "Your Personal Penguin." All day long I have been singing it to myself in my office (with my door closed, yes). I am about at the end of my rope. "Lots of other penguins seem to do fine in a universe of nothing by ice. But if I could
be yours and you could be mine, our cozy little world could be twice as nice."

We are finally emerging from our universe of nothing but ice. For the past week, the weather in Bellevue rather resembled...the weather in Minnesota. At least the weather we remember- who knows what it's doing this year. Last Wednesday afternoon, the work hallway buzz was that it was starting to snow, and that people were having trouble getting up the ramp out of our subterranean parking garage. I decided to join the herd and get on the road. I left at 4:30 to a traffic jam in our own little parking lot (and a beautiful, fluffy snowfall). I had to wait ten
minutes to get out of my parking space. Traffic is a strangely big deal here, and is rabidly tracked and reported on. But normal traffic is meaningless as compared to what happens when any sort of precipitation other than our normal warm rain enters the picture. People here simply do not do winter driving. Collectively, we lose our nerve. In our defense, of course, we can cite the hilly terrain. When I finally got out of the parking lot and around the corner onto the main road, going up the long, steep, impressively iced-up hill to the freeway at a slow crawl was a little nerve wracking, especially as we had to snake around cars with tires making that futile RRRRRrrreeeeeeeee sound, and other cars that had been outright abandoned. (Abandoning one's car is a common response to winter driving conditions here.)

The freeway was easier to navigate, but when I got back off, things were similarly nuts. On a stretch of road that normally takes me four minutes to drive through, I sat behind a burgundy Ford Explorer, stopped sometimes as long as five minutes before we would creep forward another ten feet. The Explorer had a DVD playing, and at first I thought it was "Air Bud," because I don't know of any other movie that has a cute yellow lab as the main character. Then of course there was scene after scene of lots of cutie cute yellow lab puppies running around. I have never seen "Air Bud," but I know it has something to do with basketball, and there didn't seem to be any sports in this puppy-centered film. Was it the yellow lab version of 101 Dalmations? You can have that one for nothing, Disney. I could tell who the bad guys were, because, just like in the dalmation movie, they were always sitting in some kind of van. The puppies somehow found the last functioning drive-in movie theater in the country and for reasons unclear to me, invaded the snack bar. A woman ordered a large popcorn and a moment later a cutie cute yellow lab puppy burst out of it. What a mess! But, cute! All the while, George Bush addressed those of us with the radio on about his brilliant plan to fix a much messier and much less adorable popcorn spill far, far away. That's when I started to regret that I couldn't actually hear the 101 Yellow Labs movie.

Normally, if I leave work at 4:30, I can pick up Naomi at her daycare and still be home shortly after 5:00. On Wednesday I didn't get to her daycare until 6:15. There were only a few kids left, and two teachers, and Naomi's biggest concern was that she had just received some snack food, and surely I wasn't going to make her leave it there! I stopped for gas, milk, string cheese, and cheezits (the selection of nourishing food at this quikstop was about what you would expect). We sat in traffic, munching our snack food and drinking our milk, singing songs, and talking about snow. There is a strip mall near our house with a big empty K-Mart (classy, I know), and as we drove past the vast snowy parking lot, a Subaru wagon with the windows rolled down was doing harcore doughnuts. It looked like fun, but I felt like Naomi and I had about reached our winter excitement peak. Parenthood can really wreck some of your thrill seeking instinct. We got home at 7:30.

Nothing can make this already long story short, but to bring it to a close, I will report that both Thursday and Friday were "snow days," meaning that Naomi's daycare was closed. Jim and I both went to work for a half day on Friday, passing the all-wheel drive Audi baton. The snow
stayed all weekend, bolstered by a troop surge on Tuesday, resulting in another snow day. Now, finally, the temperatures are rising out of the low thirties, the snow is disappearing in the way that it normally does in the first four hours after it falls in these parts, and we are weirdly looking forward to an actual 5-day work week... barring unforeseen circumstances, of course. To the other parts of the country (and now Europe) who are having similar run-ins with this big bad winter, we stand with you. That's the real reason we abandoned our cars.