good times

Yes my blogging friends, I used to be a preschool teacher. A Montessori preschool teacher to be exact. It was my first job out of college utilizing my child development degree, and a job that I remember well.

It was madness I tell you.

I used to come home and collapse on my bed in an exhausted heap. My roommates would not speak to me for about an hour so my introverted soul could recoup from the craziness. I stuck with it for three years.

I really love working with kids and so when I visited this little preschool with a friend a while back I got to relive those days of perpetual sand in my shoes, working out sharing issues over the dump trucks, hanging a gazillion wet art pieces up on the clothesline to dry, and learning to live with snot. (It was basically just my early test-run for motherhood.)

Ah, good times...

There was the time that four-year-old Alex came back to school after having a circumcision and insisted on showing everyone his "band-aid". (Makes me laugh every time I tell this story.)

We had to reinforce the rule about keeping your clothes on, which actually was probably made in the first place because he would sneak into the classroom while we were having outside play time, strip down, and then would burst out the door and streak across the play yard. Man was he fast.

And how about that time when Brice announced that the applesauce snack was "SPICEY!!" only to have me swipe it from his hands and discover that I had served him spoiled apple sauce. (ON ACCIDENT PEOPLE!)  He never trusted the applesauce again. (I would like to note that he also said the same thing when I watched him put an ant in his mouth.)

Or how about the time I discovered that little Johnny could completely read, write, and add/subtract three and four digit numbers in his head in seconds...and he was four years old. He also could give me the precise road map directions, including the freeways, to his home in a nearby city. Oh, and I taught him how to do decimal points, and introduced long division.

And I will not forget the time when Alex (the band-aid kid) brought his pet caterpillar to Show and Tell and then misplaced it on the carpet at circle time while he was waiting for his turn to show it...only to have it turn up a few weeks later as a butterfly newly hatched from its cocoon on the underside of the eaves of the dollhouse roof. Look teacher, I found my caterpillar!

I will never ever ever forget the time that Tyler (God bless his heart) told his mom that the woman in the Pepsi commercial looked like his teacher Tracey. The woman in the Pepsi commercial was Cindy Crawford. I think I am still living off of the high from that one. 

There was one little girl that I loved. Her name was Elise and she would draw pictures of the two of us underneath rainbows. We only had big circle heads with enormously long legs and arms sticking out of them. But I loved those pictures anyway because they were developmentally perfect. Scribbles first, then circles, then circles with legs. Always the first people to appear on a child's paper.

Sometimes I think about those kids and I miss them and wonder if I would recognize them. I hate to acknowledge this, but some of them have already graduated from college, might even be married and have kids. Don't even try to do the math.

As if that doesn't make me feel old enough, after my preschool days I went on to teach high school English for four years.  Those students are now my peers (with kids of their own)...and are now my friends....and read this blog...and come over to my house and play NHL Hockey on the XBox, with my husband...and leave comments on my Facebook page asking me when I will do a blog post about hockey.

Yep, that sure makes me feel old.

So when you think of me now, just remember that I used to be a young, Cindy Crawford'ish, preschool teacher who totally rocked her first real job. K?