Jaime is just about 22 months old, and today we enrolled him in the Webster Montessori School, for their 3-hour morning program. So, how does that jive with our recent joining of Rochester’s SimplyHomeschooling group? Like I told Vivi, in my view, “homeschooling” really means taking ultimate responsibility for the education of your children. So, when you homeschool, you don’t expect you’ll be your child’s one and only teacher, on every subject. You farm it out. In fact, judging from the posts on the SimplyHomeschooling mailing lists, there’s an awful lot of farming out going on. Some people even end up sending their kids to public school because the child asked to go. If Jaime someday asks to go to public school, I will probably send him - though I’d prefer he wait till 11 or 12 before deciding to ask. If he asks at 8, I’ll have a tough decision, since I think the early years are the most damaging at school. Montessori looks like a great place for Jaime to learn some valuable skills, and also a place he’ll really enjoy. It has been hard to get him out and meeting kids consistently, so this is, in part, to give him that outlet. At 5 years of age, the Montessori program wants the child to stay all day. At this point, I would have a problem with that. All day in one single room, 5 days a week seems very restrictive to me. They may do wonderful things, but does that make up for such a drastic curtailment of his life experiences? I have the same complaint about all day school. I expect at that point to need to find an alternative for Jaime, but that’s a ways down the road. For now, we’re pretty happy about this.
At 22 months, Jaime is about 36″ tall - maybe very slightly over or under, and probably weighs around 33 lbs. I’m starting to realize just how tall this is for his age. He seems to be taller than most 3-year-olds, and is a head taller than any other kids his age. Of course, he has never met Dylan, who was apparently 39 inches and 35 lbs at his 2-year birthday. Holy Cow! But I bet Jaime is taller in the end :-)
Jaime’s grandparents (my parents) visited for Labor Day weekend. He had a lot of fun with Nana and Papa, and they bought him lots of toys and books. They bought him a new bridge for his wooden chu-chu set, plus new track pieces that we laid out for his biggest living room chu-chu display ever. He was very excited, and went to bed complaining that he wanted to go “down” (for downstairs), and play with his “chu-chu” and “bidge” (for “bridge, which ends up sounding like “Bitch” when Jaime says it, which entertains Vivi endlessly). When Jaime first learned that pizza was good stuff, he enthusiastically called it “puta”, which means “whore” in Spanish, though is probably a rougher word in Spanish. Vivi enjoyed that too. At the Y, climbinb all over the jungle gym in the adventure center, he cried “fuck!” quite clearly when he got stuck (he had just recently learned the word “stuck”). Sometimes those words just don’t come out right, but we know what he means :-)
This morning, Jaime awoke at 5:30 and cried until 6:30 because he wanted to go downstairs and play chu-chu with his new bridge. He only stopped when Mama got up and played with him, though we didn’t take him downstairs until after 7. He is incredibly persistent. Another persistence story: at Long-Acre Farms, inside the store, he saw some little tractors. Saw one he liked and wailed when I wouldn’t buy it for him. Fortuntely, we were just leaving, so we got in the car while he cried. The next week, Vivi went back to the farm where Jaime plays with the goats and mazes and stuff, and immediately upon getting out of the car, began screaming “tractor, tractor!” (actual pronunciation: “trach-chure”), and wasn’t to be mollified until the same yellow tractor was in his hands and his.
We are bad, bad parents ;-)
