Puzzles in the morning

I don’t usually drop Will off at daycare—he gets all clingy and sad about his mommy leaving, and since he started daycare so much younger than Laura, I couldn’t take it, frankly, when he was a baby, and it’s a habit now. Chris has almost always done the drop off, and then I pick him up: a much happier time, let me tell you. You get the big yelled “Mommy!” greeting, hugs, and stories about all the little things that happened that day (the farther away from school the kids get, the less they seem to remember about what happened there).

I’m on spring break this week, though, so to give Chris a little more time at school in the mornings, I’m taking Will in. Predictably, he was happy as a bug until we actually got in the classroom, when he started crying and wouldn’t let me put him down. Fortunately I was able to divert him with a new alligator puzzle and got my goodbye kiss and hug shortly afterwards without any dire consequences.

They’ve started this new thing at school: tag names. All the kids have their names written on a little animal shaped piece of laminated construction paper with a slip of Velcro on the back. Then when one wants to play in the block area, she takes her tag name and sticks on it on the block section. I think they’re trying to limit the number of kids playing in any given area at a time this way, but it seems more like a socialization exercise: training them for their cubicles later in life. How to follow rules. I left Will in Manipulatives this morning (meaning puzzles and other stuff you have to manipulate, one hopes). Now here I am at work with my own version of manipulatives: the keyboard.