4 Days of Thankfulness

This morning we had our first parent-teacher conference with S-Boogie's preschool teachers. I will admit to being a little nervous--it's hard as a parent to not feel judged when your children are being evaluated. It turned out to be a very positive experience. I'm grateful that she is in such a quality program that focuses on what preschool should be: learning social and cognitive skills and not just rote learning. They use a "core curriculum" with four major focus areas (social, cognitive, motor, and language) that are broken into smaller, specific goals. S-Boogie's teachers first praised her for her adaptability, her friendliness, her enthusiasm for writing and drawing, and her great motor skills. Then we set goals for her to work on. We actually don't have any motor skills goals because she is doing well in all areas there. In the social area we are going to work on her ability to manage her emotions (instead of bursting into tearful drama over every difficulty) as well as her problem-solving skills. This is something the school is working on as well; the other week she made a "friendship kit" with pictures of ideas to solve conflict (like "take turns", "ask for help", "ignore", "trade", etc). When she and Little Dude were fighting over a toy the other day I asked her to stop and think about what she could do she. She went and got her kit, got out the picture that said "trade", and then traded a toy for the one Little Dude had. I'm so grateful to get guidance on these kinds of issues, and now we're working on these things as a family to have less conflict and more harmony in our house. These goals are related to her cognitive goal, which is to learn how to try different solutions to problems. For most of her life I have noticed that she doesn't have a lot of patience for trying new things. She tends to gravitate towards the things she can do well (and there are a lot of them), so we're going to try to gently push her to take time to explore things more in depth. Her language goal is to work on storytelling and anticipating what will happen next in a story. Again, it's all related to the general idea of more in-depth thinking and attention to detail. So, despite the fact that I just spent a whole paragraph describing the things we are going to work on, she's doing so well. This conference helped us clarify some issues we've been having and gave us direction as parents to see how we can help S-Boogie be her best self.

Besides being grateful for finding a good school, I'm grateful for my children. Even after four years I still feel somewhat lost as a mother. There are some aspects of mothering that don't come easily to me. There are days when sit back and wonder how I ended up with this life that I didn't anticipate. But I also didn't anticipate how fulfilling it could be. It's hard to explain why conversations with someone dressed as "Super Princess Kitty Cat" are fulfilling, but they are. I'm grateful that my kids have given me the opportunity to find that out.