mommapalooza

a fish tale

Madeline's swimming classes wrapped up for the term this afternoon, and while I am glad that no I longer have to spend those thirty minutes poolside with the Thailand sun beating down on me, I'm going to miss watching her transformation into a little sea otter. The little girl I took to the pool back at the beginning of September was afraid to get her face wet and now she's independently aquatically mobile for distances of eight feet or less.

I cannot rave about Madeline's swim class and instructor enough! I loved that she was in a small class - until the last week of November, it was just her and two of her friends from preschool. Her instructor could give each of them a decent amount of individual attention/instruction. I love that her instructor somehow teaches swimming skills by not really teaching per se ... going hunting for starfish in the deep end instead of learning to blow bubbles and float, or running away from alligators instead of merely kicking with a flutter board. Madeline must think it's thirty minutes of water games!   

Today at the end of class, everyone received their progress reports.  I was really touched that Madeline's instructor took the time to put his arm around each of the little girls and boys and explain each line of their progress report to them, even through they're all three years old and not particularly literate. Madeline's report had a tidy row of check marks, and she's invited to start in the next level in January. She'll be a better swimmer than I am, in, oh, about six months :)

scar

  scar 
  Originally uploaded by goingdomestic.

I don't think that there is a baby book in existence anywhere that has a space where a parent can fill in an entry for "baby's first scar". I guess it's not a milestone that everyone would want to record for posterity. In this photo, I can see the nearly-healed little wound on Madeline's chin. She and Chris were playing in our den nearly two weeks ago, and she fell, and her previously-flawless little chin hit and rubbed against the laminate floor. Neither Chris nor I expected such a wound from that accident, but there was lots of blood and it was scary for us all, even though it was the equivalent of a skinned knee.

I look at how it's healing, and think that it will be Madeline's first scar.

"it floats on water" quoth madeline

Everyone's preschooler came home from class today with a krathong, right? For Loy Krathong?

Oh. Maybe just in Thailand :)

I am not entirely sure how much of this krathong was made with my child's own two hands (I'm guessing that she stuck in the incense sticks and some orchid blossoms and called it done), but it's one of the neatest things that she's brought home from preschool.

Madeline's school had a small Loy Krathong celebration this morning. Several of the Thai parents helped with activities, and quite a few of the little children were dropped off in Thai costume. As usual, I wished that I could be a fly on the wall of her classroom - I'm so curious about what they learned and did today!

Tomorrow we'll take Madeline's krathong down to the Chao Phraya river and let it set sail ...

creative process

Madeline's preschool is really interesting; they take their art very seriously. I'm not sure if it's part of the Reggio-Emilia philosophy, or just a reflection of hiring a specialist art teacher to benefit the toddlers and preschoolers who go there. Usually, their art teacher has them working on larger group pieces. At least, I think so, as up to this point Madeline has only brought home two small clay sculptures and she has art class three times a week. Surely, they must be doing something! And then, on Monday, she brought home this:

It's the loveliest thing I've ever seen (yes, my mommy-coloured glasses are on)!

There is a little information sheet posted at Madeline's school about how her class made their paintings. Sketch, then review. Highlight lines, then review. Paint background. Add colours, then review. Silly me thought that her teacher gave them a piece of paper and some paints and said, "Go to work". But no, there was a process. I think it's so wonderful that a teacher would give a group of three and four year-olds the opportunity to approach art this way.

I wonder why she merely produces single-colour squiggles with her crayons here at home?

a beary big project

I've blogged before about the mystery surrounding the daily activities at Madeline's preschool. She's been a student there for nearly three months now, and is somewhat more forthcoming with details about what she does each morning. The activity that I find the most intriguing is their big project - bears. Bears seem to have taken over every learning objective in her classroom!

It started, I believe, when the class read the story Bear Snores On by Karma Wilson (great book - we've borrowed all of the sequels from the library). Then the class wanted a bear cave of their own. So, they pretended that a large box was a bear cave. Then, the class decided to paint it, so they had to figure out what colour bear caves were. Next, they had to determine what kind of objects, if any, were in bear caves. Reportedly, the troupe of three year-olds went into the school yard to collect leaves for the interior of their bear cave.

The bears are everywhere. Madeline and her class have made art like bears, walking across a canvas on paint-covered hands and feet. They count bears at their math table, trace bears on their computer station, and they probably try to dance like bears during their movement and music unit on Wednesdays.

They've smelled and tasted some of the foods that bears eat. When Madeline brought home a muffin last Thursday, their cooking day, it contained the kind of berries that bears like to eat, of course.  I was glad they didn't make muffins with salmon :)

This weeks, the intrepid three year-olds have brought stuffed bears from home to live in the bear cave, and tomorrow, the teddy bears are having a picnic ...

The Secret Lives of Preschoolers

Chris and I have concluded that we'll never fully know how Madeline fills the hours between eight in the morning and noon on weekdays. She's at preschool, and she's already mastered the "I don't know" auto-reply when we ask her what she did at school that day. We can get more detailed answers from her, but we have to know exactly which detailed questions to ask. It's not uncommon for us to be clueless for the majority of the week.

It's quite a treat when we're permitted a little insight into her life away for us. For the past little while, she's run madly around the house in the morning, ignoring my reminders that it's time to leave for school. "I need something to show!" she explains, dashing about. Show on the playground? Anyway, she eventually finds some treasured object that she wants to take to school and stuffs it in her backpack. I always assumed that it was something to play with in the school yard. Then, one day last week, Madeline's teacher came up to me at pick-up time and said that Madeline had done a really good job talking about her ball (the treasured object of the day) for Show & Tell.

Um. Show and Tell? Why was that the first that I'd heard of it? I immediately started panicking inside, wondering if Madeline had missed other Show and Tell days, because I didn't remind her to pack something, because I didn't know that she even had Show and Tell!

But then I calmed down. Madeline seems to be fine with taking responsibility for Show and Tell. If she's cool, well, I guess I can be, too.

madeline's mail

  madeline's mail 
  Originally uploaded by goingdomestic.

Madeline doesn't receive mail very often, so it's quite a treat to watch her excited little face when a new edition of one of her magazines arrives. Sometimes she immediately starts "reading" the new magazine to herself, and other times she'll ask Chris or I to sit down and read it to her. She keeps all of the old issues, too. They spent a couple of months in our car, being thumbed through on the often-slow treks into central Bangkok until I became quite tired of reading the one-minute stories about the lives of "Tommy" and "Tess" in Wild Animal Baby over and over again. Now the magazines are kept in a careful stack and carried from one room to another in our apartment.

small medium large

About eighteen months ago, any time that Madeline and I would take a walk around St. John's, she would practice one of her favourite activities: finding similar objects that came in different sizes. "There's a mommy snail, there's a baby snail, and that's a daddy!" she'd gleefully announce, crouching on the side of the sidewalk watching a group of snails slowly make their way to the lake. The same logic - that objects came in Baby, Mommy, and Daddy sizes - was applied by my little whiz kid to leaves, dogs, socks, crayons, and vegetables alike. Chris and I thought she was brilliant, making a size connection like that!

One day last week, Madeline announced that I was "medium", and I was sad. Somehow, small/medium/large isn't as endearing. But I am glad to know that she must be paying attention in preschool at least some of the time :)

go figure/go fish

I was going to post about something entirely different today, but nothing  was more remarkable than Madeline's performance at her swimming lesson today.

As we approached the pool, I heard one of her classmates ask, "Is she going to cry again?" I grinned, remembering last week, and replied, "Well, lets keep our fingers crossed that she won't!"

And Madeline didn't. She started class by jumping into the deep end and grabbing onto the side of the pool, just like the other two girls in her class. Unbelievable! As the minutes passed, Madeline blew bubbles while kicking with a pool noodle, she put her head underwater to reach for plastic alligators, and she paddled a couple of feet out to her instructor without any swim aids! I could not believe what I was seeing! She must be getting as comfortable in her lessons as she is with Chris and I at the pool back at our apartment, because she participated fully in the lesson.

At the end of the class, Madeline waved goodbye to her coach, and told me, "Mom, I wasn't shy today!"  No kidding.

you can lead a horse to water

I think it was fifteen minutes. I was trying not to look too concerned, sending encouraging smiles in Madeline's general direction. At Madeline's latest swimming lesson, she sat at the edge of the pool, sobbing, for the first fifteen minutes of her thirty minute class.

Madeline loves going to the pool at our apartment, and is quite happy to try to paddle her way into the deep end, so I'm not entirely sure why her swim lessons have been on the traumatic side. Is it because it's in a different pool? Because neither Chris nor I are in the water with her? I thought that she was mature enough for "real", un-parented lessons.

Nonetheless, the other day she sat on the edge, nose running and puffy-eyed, until halfway through the class her instructor decided that it was time to jump into the pool through hoops of imaginary ice cream. Ice cream. That's something that Madeline definitely approves of. She was off of her bottom in no time, and repeatedly jumped into the pool, into the center of the pool noodle that was standing in for a circular ice cream sundae. And then she was fine for the rest of the lesson.

As we were leaving the pool after the lesson, her instructor asked us parents to remind him to start off the class with jumps next week :)