Until now, playdates for Will have been mostly joint affairs – get-togethers for moms and kids all at once. I realized yesterday, when we had Will’s friend Creight come over by himself, how much I can accomplish around the house during a kids-only playdate and how much more I notice about the kids’ play when I’m not flapping my own mouth with another mom or two.

The highlight from yesterday afternoon was when I eavesdropped from the kitchen on this conversation that the boys were having in the next room. For over an hour, Will, wearing his spiderman costume, and Creight, dressed up as Batman, had been concocting various superhero adventures around the house. Their teacher had talked with them earlier in the day about how the Pilgrims came over on the Mayflower from England after deciding they didn’t want to live under their king anymore, all of which managed to inspire this dialogue (which I quickly started transcribing):

Batman: I’m glad we’re here to protect each other.

Spiderman: Me too. And when we kill bad guys we protect the whole world too. So there’s no more bad guys except in England. Because the people want to do what they want to do, so that’s why they sailed to America, so they don’t have to live under the king.

Batman: I think we should go to England and kill the king with our guns.

Spiderman: Ok, let’s go!

And the boys gathered some plastic pegs, which they were using as guns, and ran into the next room.

For me, fresh off reading Vivian Paley’s “A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play” (which I recommend to early childhood teachers and parents alike), it was a fun scene to overhear.

Redshirt preschoolers

I’m preparing to get myself motivated to seek out school options for Will next year. Beyond having no clear sense of where he’ll go to elementary school, we’re also still wrestling just a bit with whether to have him repeat pre-K this year. Ever since he was born on his August 31 birthday, I’ve been leaning towards two years of pre-K. Even Rob, who was once a proponent of sending Will on if he seemed intellectually ready, is hesitant to send our not-at-all-tall son into the daunting world of kindergarten, where he would be about 2 years younger than some of his “redshirted” male peers who would doubtless look something like giants next to him.

Will’s got plenty of maturing to do, but at least so far, he’s kind of a do-gooder at school – focused during circle time, careful in executing written work, happy to sit very still for just about any book – all of which sort of complicates the issue. He’s not necessarily one of those jumping-off-the-walls-boys for whom school is a cruel punishment inflicted way too soon. Still I’ve heard many stories from mothers and educators who regretted sending their son too soon (some of whom didn’t come to regret the decision until their sons were in high school) but I have yet to hear from someone who regretted holding their son back. And there’s a good part of me that likes the idea of protecting Will from that grueling 8:00 to 3:00 day that is public school kindergarten for an extra year. I may wind up holding him back a year just to keep him playing creatively and moving around for several extra hours per week. In the end, maybe he’ll learn more?

We’re still mulling it over though. If you’ve got any advice on the matter or your own personal story, I’d love to hear it. Here’s an interesting article on the subject from Australian psychologist Steve Biddulph.

It’s a…… turkey??

So here’s a Thanksgiving edition of what I’m thinking should be a series entitled “What’s That????? Crafts.” (Go here for What’s That??? Halloween crafts.) This one was fun and simple – if slightly unrecognizable -- and part of a test run for an art project I’ll do with my preschool students later in the week.

Here Will, my guinea pig artist, displays his small-bodied turkey:

You can make a much-improved version with your kids at home:

Give your child a coffee filter and have them color away with Crayola markers. Let them know they’re coloring the feathers of a turkey. When they’re finished give them a tub of water and a small paint brush and let them paint over the marker with water for a watercolor effect. Then draw a body at least twice as big as the one I drew for Will (not sure where my turkey proportioning skills ran off to today) and let them attempt to cut the thing out. If it looks a little rectangular so be it. Let them draw on eyes, beak and wattles – or do more construction paper cutting for these features – and glue to the filter. And voila! -- it’s a tie-dye turkey.

Visiting Westville

We’ve been living in Columbus for five years now, and finally made our first trip to Historic Westville, “Georgia’s working 1850s town” yesterday – partly inspired by the fact that they were hosting a fall festival, complete with some bluegrass music by the Bibb City Ramblers. I wasn’t sure how much Will would appreciate a living history museum, but it turned out to be a perfect adventure for a 4-year-old.

Will and his friend Charlie enjoyed touring the historic homes, where they found the spinning wheels, the wells and the old fashioned cradles fascinating. “Can we go into another house?” they’d ask.

At one stop, we looked at a butter churn, which Will remembered learning about in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House in the Big Woods.” I hadn’t considered how the Wilder books had prepared Will to think about what life must have been like “in the olden days.”

We also sampled some ginger bread, cornbread biscuits and cane syrup juice – all concocted by costumed “townspeople” in their various old fashioned ways.

The boys, Owen included, enjoyed playing with the crude wooden toys of a pre-plastic, pre-battery era...

and communing with the farm animals.

Here’s a final photo by photographer Will:

Watching history

Before the presidential race was called, the highlight of my election day was a trip I made a few hours before the polls closed here to an apartment building near our house. A few weeks ago I’d helped a handful of residents there register to vote and apply for absentee ballots because they were either elderly or had no transportation to the polls. One man was 87 and had hands too shaky to do much more than sign his name. I helped him fill out forms and promised to return to help him with his ballot. When I went back over a week ago I learned that he’d been hospitalized with pneumonia. I wondered if he might be dying.

On Tuesday I went to the apartment building once more to check on whether two of the other voters whose absentee ballots never came in the mail were able to make it to the polls. (One woman, in her 60s, had found a ride, and carted her oxygen tank along with her.) And there standing and smiling on his front porch was the 87-year-old-man, recovered from his pneumonia. He went into his apartment and found his ballot, and we sat down together as I read the ballot to him and bubbled in his selections, then watched as he labored to sign it with his shaky hand. As I drove the ballot to the elections office, I thought about just how much history this man had witnessed over his life and how it must feel to him to have traveled through the decades from a time when he was denied the right to vote to a time when he could watch a black man become the 44th president of the United States of America.

I wrote those first couple paragraphs as the election results were still coming in. And then when in his victory speech, Barack Obama spoke eloquently about the even longer journey through history of a 106-year-old Atlanta voter named Ann Nixon Cooper, I thought again about my 87-year-old neighbor and about how all of us saw our world change last night.

Trunk-or-treat

We managed to squeeze in a brief stint of coastal trick-or-treating with Will, the knight, last Friday while sick Owen, who never donned his dragon costume, stayed at the cabin with my parents. We procrastinated about the whole affair and as we drove through the 7 p.m. dark toward the little town center at Seaside, an obviously nervous Will asked, “Mom, why can’t we go trick-or-treating in the morning?”

Note to self: Next year trick-or-treat before dinner. Some four-year-olds get spooked in the dark even when they're wearing protective armor.

We learned at Seaside that we’d missed the business-sponsored trick-or-treat session, which catered to more responsible parents who got their little ones out between 4 and 6. But a semi-nearby Methodist Church was hosting a trunk-or-treat, we learned, and tourist-stragglers like us were welcome.

So we drove through the dark up a highway to a church in the middle of nowhere, where the trunk hosts generously dropped handfuls of candy and Cliff bars and packs of gum into Will’s jackolantern pail. He was only brave enough to approach about four trunks and he still came away with a hefty load.

“What do you say?” I’d ask him as we approached a new car.

“You say it,” he'd say shyly, pointing to me.

So we compromised. I’d count to 3 and together we’d chant “Trick or Treat” with Will speaking in a barely audible whisper.

I was grateful to the church for saving Halloween for Will – but part of me felt like we were trick-or-cheating. I thought about the days when I had to work for each bit of candy in my pail, going door to door and earning one little piece at a time, until I’d covered the whole town, walked a mini-Halloween marathon, worked up a sweat and filled my bucket with candy that I would count and organize and then savor, one piece at a time, until about a month later when I’d finally finished the stuff off. Will has apparently inherited that penchant for counting and organizing candy rather than simply wolfing it all down. He’s held candy arranging sessions every day since Halloween.

Here he is working up the nerve to approach his first trunk.

And here are a couple shots of the boys enjoying the beach with Grammy on Halloween morning, the one day when neither of the boys was nauseated.

If that's a vacation, I need a vacation from it

Our vacation to the beach over the past half week turned into a vacation from good health. In the middle of the night, maybe 6 hours after we arrived with my parents at the cabin at Grayton Beach State Park, Will came down with a nasty stomach bug, which lasted just 8 hours for him, but which Owen then managed to catch and keep for the rest of our stay. That left us one morning and afternoon with everyone happy on the beach -- and the rest of the time Owen and I, especially, were mostly in survival mode. Since Owen decided to get well just in time for our return trip, this is one vacation I’m pretty glad to be back from. I’ll post a couple photos from our happier moments when I recover my sanity.