From Toddlers2Teens

My two middle children attend the same head-start program. Their classrooms are right next to each other, but the only difference is my son - who’s now 5 - is in the kindergarten readiness class and my daughter is in a regular head-start class.

When school began my daughter was 3 years old and, according to the staff there, everyone in her class is the “same chronological age.” However, the difference in the children’s intellect was obvious to me. Whereas my daughter, who’s now 4, knew how to write her name, recite her alphabet and had been potty trained since she was 2 years old (among other things) some of the other children weren’t even close.

My children had attended the same daycare provider who believed a child was capable of learning whatever was presented to them unless a disability or something presented itself. In fact, it was discovered that my daughter grasped things a little more quickly and is more focused than my son. They’re 15 months apart in age, but for the past two years we have treated them as “equals” (if you know what I mean).

Today, my son’s class went to the circus. I don’t have to tell you that my daughter was not happy about this. She couldn’t understand why she couldn’t go with her brother, Andre, to the circus. His teacher said it’s because the class is older. Although I relayed the message to Amareah, along with my own message (”There are going to be times when you will do something different Andre and the other way around. Sometimes your class does stuff that his class doesn’t.”), I thought it a bunch of malarkey.

I knew this was going to cause a problem. Even if she got over the fact that he went to the circus (who can forget given his morning chant of ‘I’m going to the circus! I’m going to the circus!…), I had a feeling something else would present itself. And it did, in the form of a baton with streamers.

As soon as I saw my son with the baton (that each and every child in the class had), I could feel my daughter’s eyes drilling a hole in it and her brother. When she walked up to him after school the first thing she wanted to do was touch it. And, as expected, he pulled it away.

They argued and fussed about that dreaded thing the entire way home, and I threatened to take it away. During the ride Amareah pulled streamers from it. At home she pulled streamers from it. By the time we went to get the baby about two hours later there were no streamers on it.

Did that prevent them from arguing about it? Nope, of course not. My youngest, Anna, even got in on it and started screaming for that pitiful thing. By this time I didn’t see the appeal. Oh, did I mention they had opened it up and took the shiny streamer from the inside too?

This is all that was left by the end of the day and they were still arguing over it…

Now that the ordeal is over (and the baton will mysteriously find its way hidden under the couch), I thought of a few tips to prevent this from happening in the future:

1. Don’t have children less than three years apart.
2. If it’s too late and your children are close together and there’s a field trip that one isn’t going on do whatever you can to keep it a secret. (Bribe one kid, keep one kid home sick or send them to stay with grandparents!)
3. Okay, seriously… Not giving souvenir money doesn’t work - as I found out today - so the best thing to do would be to give the teacher money to buy an extra souvenir, if possible. Oh, I guess in my case that would be TWO extra souvenirs.

 Do you have any tips for dealing with the “I want what he has blues?”

Trackback URI | Comments RSS