Happy Halloween 2007

Given how excited Fiona has been for this all week month year I'm starting to think this is better than Christmas, at least for a three-year old.

Busy

This morning as I helped Fiona dress she chose a rainbow shirt and a pair of tights decorated with stripes and bright flowers. With inimitable preschooler fashion sense, she then chose a skirt with a different flower pattern on it.

"I don't know if you should wear that skirt," I said.

"Why not?" she asked.

"It's a little busy."

Fiona protested. "But I'm going to be busy at preschool!"

She wore the skirt.

Bye Bye Miriam

Fiona's favorite (non-family) babysitter, Miriam, is moving home to Mexico. She and her husband had been discussing returning for several months, and when his mother became ill they decided it was time to go.

Miriam has been a hugely important figure in Fiona's life. She was an assistant at Fiona's day care starting when Fiona was about 18 months old. We started hiring her to babysit occasionally, and I still remember our shock when we left Fiona with a babysitter and she didn't scream or cry.

Things got even better recently when Miriam had a son, Jeomar. We started joking that, from Fiona's perspective, the only thing better than having Miriam babysit was having Miriam-with-baby babysit. As many little girls do, Fiona adores babies, and she loved playing with Jeomar. The first time after the birth that Miriam came over to sit we all lost it when we said good-bye to Fiona and she called out after us "don't worry, Mommy, I won't hurt the baby!"

But now Miriam is leaving, and Fiona and Andrea headed over to her home yesterday after preschool to say farewell. Miriam gave Fiona a card and a pair of earrings (which she'll have to grow into since Fiona's a few years away from having her ears pierced). Fiona gave Miriam a picture she drew.

I didn't scan that picture, but Fiona's drawing has definitely taken off. She likes to draw flowers, butterflies and suns, and I think all of those are readily identifiable in her pictures:

Thank you, Miriam, and good luck with everything.

Phonics

Preschool has really sharpened Fiona's understanding of how letters work. Each week they learn how to recognize whichever letter they're learning about in upper and lower case, plus what sound that letter makes. Which is how Fiona winds up walking around the house saying "duh, duh, duh, D!"

Miss Eny is only up through D so far, but Fiona's been demonstrating applied knowledge. Last Christmas she got a puzzle that matched up pictures of words with the first letter of that word (so a picture of a house would go with the letter "h" and so forth). Fiona couldn't figure the puzzle out when we first got it, but this afternoon she put the whole thing together. Help from Daddy was mainly limited to letting her know that it was a picture of a "nest" and not a "bird", or steering her toward "g" instead of "j" on giraffe (since "g" makes a soft "guh, guh, guh" sound as far as Fiona knows).

Still, we're having some confusion. The language is obviously littered with situations like "giraffe" where two letters make a similar sound (just as Fiona has yet to discover that some letters like "c" can make two different sounds). This morning Fiona announced to me that "airplane starts with 'a', and also with 'j'." I was a tad perplexed, so Fiona walked me over to a toy she has that shows various letters with pictures and proceeded to point to a picture of a jet.

And I did find myself telling a white lie at bedtime tonight. We were reading a story about Belle (from Beauty and the Beast) and her horse, Phillippe (princesses, horses--yes, we're in that phase). Fiona sounded out Phillipe's name and announced that "fuh, fuh, Phillippe starts with 'f'."

I paused. I really didn't want to confuse her any further. "Phillippe starts with an 'f' sound, that's right," I said. I've already wound up in enough complicated discussions at bedtime lately.

School News

Andrea's fighting a cold this week so I took Fiona to school this morning. I hadn't dropped her off in over a month, and it was an amazing difference. When she walked in the door one of her friends, David, instantly started shouting "It's Fiona! Fiona's here!" as he ran around to the other kids letting them know Fiona had arrived.

Then, after a hug for Daddy as I helped her out of her raincoat and boots, Miss Eny called out "where's my hug?" and Fiona ran across the room to embrace her teacher with nary a glance back at me.

Miss Eny is very impressed with Fiona's ability to draw letters. This week they're learning about the letter "C" and Fiona wanted to write the word "cat." She tried copying the word on the page, but she got very frustrated because she couldn't make the lower case "a". So Miss Eny covered up the word and told her to draw the letter the way she knows. Fiona wrote the word "CAT" in all upper case, which her teacher found very impressive.

Yesterday, Miss Eny helped Fiona make the letter "N", which is always the letter in her name that she's had the hardest time doing by herself (most of the time she writes out "FIO" and then asks us to hold her hand with her to draw the "N", before she does the "A" herself). When I picked Fiona up, the first thing she told me was that she drew letter N. And then when we got home, she ran full speed into the house to tell her mommy that she drew an N at school and announced that she wanted to practice more.

That's par for the course: when I come home and Andrea's waiting, Fiona rushes to show her whatever exercise she did in school that day so that we can put it up on her bulletin board.

So school is going well. On the weekends Fiona likes to pretend to be Miss Eny, welcoming us to the class by singing the song I'm assuming the kids sing every day:

Welcome to school today
Welcome to school today
Welcome to school today
We are here to learn and play...

First Field Trip

Fiona's preschool took their long-awaited first field trip today to the Green Meadows Farm and Petting Zoo in Floral Park, with her mother along as a chaperone. Fiona's class spent all of last week learning about farms and animals (cows and goats give milk, the rooster wakes the farm up) and also about proper field trip etiquette:

• Fasten your seatbelt on the bus
  
• Hold on to your chaperone's hand or a bad person might take you (see, Nana, that's what you're supposed to tell your daughter is going to happen!)

Apparently the lesson was so well imparted that when Mommy snapped this photo, Fiona was very worried because it meant Mommy was on the bus and didn't have her seat belt on yet. (By the way, as always, clicking on any of these photos will bring up a larger version.)

Anyway, the farm was a big hit, as the kids all got to see chickens and sheep, milk cows, ride ponies, go on a hayride, and finished off with a visit to the pumpkin patch. A few other observations gleaned from the parent who attended, before I just give the rest of this post over to the photos:

• We don't notice it so much since we haven't really seen her with kids her own age, but Fiona is tall. Granted, with a January birthday she's old for her class, and at this age it can make a huge difference, which is something else you notice when you see her with the other children. There's a big difference between 3 1/2 and 3, and you can also start to see how the girls are growing up faster than the boys by now.
  
  
• According to Miss Eny, Fiona is very attentive at circle time. It's pretty clear that the lesson is one of her favorite parts of the day. It's the part she likes to recreate at home (where she gets to play the role of Miss Eny, of course). And even when she was a baby we noticed how focused she can be when something catches her attention.
  
  
• She's making lots of friends. According to Andrea, multiple parents on the trip told her that their child talks about playing with Fiona at preschool. Of course, we can (and do) say the same thing about Fiona and their children.

All right, on to the photos of Fiona and her friends. This one is from the hayride, where she sat next to Tyler:

This is her friend Elaney (for those of you who have already heard her talk about her friends, it's definitely Elaney, not Melanie, and that's how you spell it):

And last we have Alex (standing) and, on the bench, Zayna, Stella, Fiona and Michelle:

Dan Zanes

About six weeks ago while we were out at Papa and Grandma's place in the Berkshires, Andrea noticed that Dan Zanes was going to be playing in Great Barrington at the end of September.

For those of you who don't subsist on a daily TV diet of Noggin and the Disney Channel, Dan Zanes is the coolest man alive. More seriously, he's a former member of the Del Fuegos who started playing children's music about 10 years ago when he had a child and discovered that most children's music was borderline insipid (or perhaps not even borderline). So he started writing his own children's songs, mixing in a generous helping of classics both obvious (Skip to My Lou) and less so (old Leadbelly songs, Spanish ballads, bits of early Americana--stuff you might happen across at a flea market).

When we got home I went online to purchase tickets and discovered that the show was nearly sold out--more than a month ahead of time. So we snatched up three tickets in a hurry and last weekend headed back up to Massachusetts to catch the legend.

I'll say this to everybody out there who has kids under age 8 or so: if Dan Zanes is passing through town, you must get tickets. He puts on an absolutely fabulous show, and Fiona adored it.

When he came out, he asked all the kids if they wanted to have a show or a party. The kids answered predictably enough, and so Dan Zanes told them that at a party nobody stays in their seats, everybody should get up and sing along and dance and do whatever else they wanted to do. He played for about 90 minutes, and I think Fiona danced for about 89 of those (it took Andrea awhile to figure out why she was so sore the next morning, until she remembered the workout daughter and Dan put her through).

When it was over, we bought Fiona a book that had the lyrics to one of Dan Zanes's songs, along with pictures, and it included a CD with that song and four more. We've been singing along together to those five songs every night this week, and while I'm never happy to have songs stuck in my head all evening, they're actually good songs.

Oh, and Fiona did get Dan Zanes' autograph in her book; that's the back of her head (I couldn't get at an angle where I could show them both):

Preschooler Gambling Picks

Not for gambling purposes...

Fiona picked 3 of the 4 teams to survive the last crazy weekend in the NL correctly (she had the Padres beating the Diamondbacks for the division title), and she did pretty well last year at picking the first round of the playoffs, so here's who she says will win out over the next week:

• Cubs beat Diamondbacks
• Rockies beat Phillies
• Angels beat Red Sox
• Cleveland beats Yankees

You heard it here first.