Vacation with Grandmommy and Papa

May 22, 2008

Sometimes email from family best captures Katie's day. This one I received today from Grandmommy:

Good morning,

Katie only slept until 7:30 am this morning. She got up happy and ready to go. She did not want any breakfast food so i offered her popcorn or ice cream. She chose the ice cream. Said she could have popcorn as a snack.

She really has been as perfect as a little girl could be. This morning we are going to the aquarium and then back to the beach. She said it is a lovely day to go to the beach.


Grandmommy gets right to the good stuff, I would say. Ice cream for breakfast. At home, she wouldn't get a bowl of ice cream until she ate a good dinner.

She's never going to want to come home.

And from Grandmommy later that evening:

She has just been completely enjoyable. She eats like a horse after the beach. Tonight I made the tater tot casserole and she dug in. I forgot the applesauce so after dinner, I mentioned that I was sure she would like some ice cream when papa and I have strawberry shortcake so she needed to eat her applesauce. She ate it in about 1 minute. We are having big fun. Hope you all are not too sad without her.

End of Her First School Year

May 20, 2008

So yesterday, Katie finished her first year of preschool. There's still two more days in the session for the other kids in her class, but Katie, Grandmommy and Papa have some beach plans in mind.

The year started off rough for Katie. She spent the first two or three months learning how to behave around other three-year-olds and how to follow directions and instructions from someone who wasn't her mommy or daddy. The initial months were especially difficult for Katie and for her mother and I, too.

After three really tough months of hearing from her teachers about Katie's struggles to adapt to the ways of a classroom, Melissa and I were a millimeter away from deciding that she just wasn't ready for preschool, and we nearly removed her from school. But we gave Katie one more - just one more - chance to show us that she could make it through a school day without fussing or having a timeout.

One school day in November - or maybe December - with both of us thinking that day would likely be her last until the next school year...she did it. She made it through the day without a fuss. Without a timeout.

And so Melissa took her back on the next school day to try again. Again, relatively good behavior.

Suddenly, the days with pretty good behavior continued to mount. And then she started to make it through her preschool day with actual good behavior. And the days of Katie's much improved behavior turned into weeks of improvement. And then it was the end of March.

The end of March witnessed the beginning of Katie's perfect school behavior. Whatever turned off - or turned on - in her brain at that time finally allowed her to breeze through each school day. We found ourselves counting consecutive days of perfect behavior. No fussing. No timeouts.

By the time she finished up her final class yesterday, we counted five consecutive weeks of perfect behavior. In fact, in the final couple of weeks of the school year, both of her teachers praised our daughter as having transformed into an "enjoyable" and "sweet" preschooler.

Thank God for a great finish to Katie's first school year.