Schoolgirls

I guessed as much, but the girls’ school experiences are already generating lots of entertainment. Julia has already fallen into a funny habit of saying, with regards to any yes/no question, “Raise your hand if…” She gets a bit miffed when nobody raises their hands, as when, Wednesday night, she asked us if we know what a “line basic” is, but gamely explains it anyhow. This morning, we learned that you have to stay close to the other kids in line, because “if you get spaces between choo-choo trains, the train falls apart,” and tonight she let both me and Shannon in on the secret wave she (and her classmates) can use if they see their principal at the grocery store, and on the subtle signal the kids can use to tell the teacher they have to go to the bathroom right now. She also told me, at breakfast on Wednesday, that one boy in her class “likes to practice burping at home, and then burped at the snack table! Loud!”

For her part, Genevieve is more given to saying, “I doan bemember” when asked a question about preschool (which started in earnest today), but then to recollect and respond anyhow. She likes seeing the gerbil, Peanut, and reported that today the “thience table” (“science table”) has seashells in it – “big theethells an’ smaw theethells an’, I sink, even medium theethells.” More than all that, she doesn’t have a wisp of worry about leaving Mama in the hall and getting down to preschool business. And tonight, she paused her madcap Raffi dancing to tell me, quite seriously, that I needed to convert her crib to a “big goil bed” right away. Her first full preschool session and a night in a big-girl bed? That would have been a lot of growing up at once, and turned out to be a too much: I had to put the rails back on the bed ten seconds after I turned out the light. Baby steps, even if you’re a little girl.