Joel-isms

"More, again."

Joel used to say "more" instead of using "again" which was more appropriate most of the time. Now he just uses both words so that he covers all the bases.

"skole"

It's how Joel says "school" it's a mix between school and store.

"I craze. " **big smile**

This is how Joel says "I'm crazy but really cute. Right, Mama?" Usually said when he does something dangerously close to inappropriate.

"Cwose door."

Joel is a little bit obsessive about closing doors. Not sure if he really got the message every time we asked him to close a door that he left open OR if there is something deeper going on.

In our world there are a couple of exceptions to the close the door behind you rule. First of all, at Grandma & Grandpa's house if you close the door to porch (which is where a lot of the playing usually happens) you will be locked out. Gotta love the weird things that happen when you live in a 100 year old house. But this doesn't stop my son from being driven - even when repeated told not to - to close that door.

The second one is when he goes out the front door to play in the car in the drive-way. I like to keep that door open so I can hear him and anyone else that comes up the front walk while he's playing out there. But he's very insistent that this door should be closed, too.

Today when I dropped him off at pre-school. He said goodbye and gave me a kiss and then walked me to the door so that he could close the door behind me. At least he's polite.

"Der ya are!"

This is what Joel says when he finds something. Usually the statement will start out, "Where's truck?" then he'll say, "Oh, der ya are!" once he finds it. It's adorable.

It's September

Well, my oldest son started pre-school last week.

I tried to prepare for whatever was going to happen. He's just barely 3 and he's a bit of an introvert so I wanted to be prepared in case he wasn't ready for pre-school.

The first day was very interesting. Lots of crying, lots of clinging. Finally, the teacher said she was willing to hold him if we wanted to go. This was our first move in the dance of figuring out what the teachers were like while the teachers figure out what we are like. My husband and I were totally fine with letting the teacher hold our crying 3 year old. So, we left.

Turns out our son was probably not feeling very well. He ended up sleeping through most of his first day of preschool. The teachers called me around 11 (one hour before we were to pick him up) and told us he had fallen asleep in the middle of the room and they had him lying down in the "library". She gave us the option of coming to pick him up now or just wait until noon. We waited until noon since it was fine with the teachers. Sure enough, he was still asleep when we got there.

I'm still not sure if he was sick or if he was just majorly stressed out. He was tired most of the day but never really registered a fever.

That night we were trying to talk to him about school and he wanted to go back. We had to hold him off until the next morning which was hard when he kept going to the front door and asking to go to school to paint.

When I dropped him off for his second day at school he went over the painting easels and started painting. I said, "Mommy's going to go home now." and he said, "OK. Bye, bye."

WOW. What a change from the day before.

Ever since that day he has been excited to go to school and leaving him there has not been a problem.

I love school! I love that I can drop my son off with these people and he's happy to be there. I love than my life is a little simpler for 3 hours , 3 days a week. I love this school thing. God Bless school!