our princess in preschool

Preschool here starts for kiddos around 18 months of age:  8:00 am to 5:00pm 5 days a week.  Clearly this is the equivalent of day care in America, except that the school near us really does a great job of making their place a great, intentional learning environment.  Teachers fill the days with nursery rhymes, learning activities, fun lessons and games.  We are so super grateful to have such an excellent school so close to our home!

In all my dreams of motherhood, the idea of letting my babies go off to preschool daycare at 18 month of age never even entered my mind.... but it seems there is a time and place for rearranging those ideas.... and this is it.  Marian started school today, 18 months old.  It's entirely a local language environment and I stayed with her for a while to watch how she was adapting.  She's been used to the local language at home when our babysitter came to the house to watch her while I had class, so this wasn't a total shock to her.  But still, I was impressed with how well she handled the commands that were told to her:  "please put your chair over here," and "you can eat the egg but not the soup, it's too hot."

When I came before noon to pick her up (both our kids go for half-days at school) the teachers all told me confidently that she never cried.  She told me tiredly, yet surely all by herself, that she indeed had lots of fun at school.  Her mama and papa are so glad, and so proud... and grateful.  It's a great encouragement to me to know that my kids are enjoying a good morning while we try to take in as much as we can of this language.  This is our last semester of majority language study.  

On the way home, we usually play for a bit in the school ball pit.


Here are some of Isaiah's classmates... two of them sporting the local style shirt-bibs which I think are ingenius!