Preschool, Stair Gates, and Vocabulary

They say that children are wired to slowly shed their need of Mommy and Daddy. As they grow, they get more confident going further away, until one day they are grown and as independent as anyone ever is.

They say that parents, unfortunately, are not wired with a complimentary shedding of their need to be Mommy and Daddy. Kathleen Poole, the teacher at Isabelle's Montessori Preschool, say she has more trouble with parents letting their babies go than with babies wanting their mommies.

So, yes, Isabelle started preschool. Each little milestone is great excitement for me, but they are also a little bit sad. There is little of her babyhood left. The stair gates are down (except for the basement and steep back stairs). The locks are off the kitchen cupboards (though not the medicine chest). She only wears diapers when she sleeps, and hasn't had an accident in weeks.

And then there's her vocabulary. To date, her language is all recognizable to me. She has certain phrases I recognize from books or movies or quirks of ours. Words she's made up on certain occasions ("color storm" for "fireworks"). She's made them her own, but they came from me or Carrie or things we picked out.

The other day I was cooking, and she wanted to see what I was doing. Sshe said, "I want you to bring your work right here." It's a Montessori phrase. What a child is doing, be it a picture, a puzzle, or a stack of tinker toys is her "work," her labor and creation.

There's something intimate about language. Something that links deeply with thought and identity. Someone else's language is now going into her language. A little part of her is growing without us, already.