Nursery School, Ho!

Now that school registration has come and gone, and a blissful silence has descended on the house, I’ve begun contemplating my hard-won freedom and wondering if the effort involved in enrolling my youngest in nursery school was worth it.

Just finding a suitable school took months, hampered as I was by friends and neighbors who tried to shame me into sending my child to a progressive nursery where they give zither lessons and a course in conversational Russian.

Unfortunately, even the least pretentious nursery school has certain requirements which the child must fulfill before he is permitted to register. These are listed in a lengthy questionnaire which, if taken seriously, would take a psychologist a month to fill out. It was right about then that I started to contemplate hiring a governess and tutoring the kid at home.

The first thing they asked was whether my child was toilet trained. Now, I understand that in some households, nine-month-old babies march themselves off to the bathroom whenever necessary, but I’m sorry to say that mine was never one of them. However, I never despaired. I simply sent the child off with trust in his heart and an extra pair of underpants in his school bag. I’m happy to announce that my confidence was not misplaced: two of my favorite children were toilet trained by their nursery school teachers.

The next question on the list was whether my child was familiar with the working of a pair of scissors. Familiar? He’s been cutting up my bed sheets with unerring accuracy for the past six months! However, I felt no obligation to supply the school with an over-abundance of information. I simply answered ‘yes’.

The next question asked whether my child could draw and color. One visit to my home would supply the answer, since my walls resemble those covered with primitive drawings in the caves at Lascaux. Again, I answered ‘yes’.

For a list of his previous medical illnesses and immunizations, I simply referred the school to the nearest public health office.

The questionnaire next asked me to list any personal idiosyncrasies or peculiarities I’d noticed in my child, or any information about him I thought the school ought to know. Now, I operate under the theory that a child shouldn’t be marked for life with a written record of peccadilloes that could later by used against him. Therefore, I never so much as hinted at what he did with the enema bag last summer, or why his best friends never invite him to sleep over at their homes. Some skeletons should never be let out of anyone’s closet.

I tell myself that the teacher has ten months in which to discover the many facets of his imaginative mind all by herself, without any help from me. If I told her what to expect, the entire school year would be an anticlimax.

The last question was the hardest of all to answer. It asked what I hoped my child would get out of nursery school. Darned if I know. The whole question seems to be academic, because if he’s anything like my other children, he’ll be home sick four days out of five anyway.