I have scrapped a very

I have scrapped a very worthy and edifying activity today in favor of just staying home and doing some laundry and tidying up some of the piles of "get to it later" things. (And blogging.)

It's been a busy fall. I enrolled Hambet in a preschool program, two hours long once a week; he had a hard time getting into the routine for a while and was getting kicked out halfway through the session. I think he's finally settling down, though he still isn't totally compliant.

I'm also doing an informal co-op playgroup/ preschool thing with some of the other moms I know. There are six kids in the group, and each week we moms take turns planning a weekly two-hour session -- songs, games, a craft, a snack, stuff like that. Another mom serves as "backup" and minds a couple of toddlers so that the other moms are free to stay and chat or run errands. We also carpool, so that also helps. The kids love it and so do the moms.

So Hambet is learning the days of the week and even asks me what "day" it is: Sunday is Church day, Monday is preschool day, Tuesday is errand day, Wednesday is playgroup day, Thursday is often "go see kids" day (when I am doing to a recollection or something and he plays with the other kids) and Friday is usually Trader Joes-and-library day.

It's so fun watching Hambet and watching the little gears turn in his mind and seeing and how fascinated he is in learning about the world and how things work, and how satified he is when he understands something. He is fascinated by numbers and loves counting; when I mentioned a math problem ("five plus two is seven") he was murmuring it to himself long afterwards ("five plus two... five plus two..."). He's also learning to recognize letters and is starting to spell out words and signs.

Hambet is also trying to learn to tell time, and it is so funny, because he will insist on all kinds of things in an effort to get what he wants (like insisting that it's five o'clock when he's just rolled out of bed in the morning). I've started telling him things like, "we're going to leave when the big hand is on the 6 and the little hand is on the 8" and he's very interested.

This all got started when Hambet went on a chocolate milk jag and started asking for chocolate milk the minute he hopped out of bed. So I told him that he could have a cup at 3 o'clock (knowing that six days out of seven, he would forget all about it by then.) So that led to teaching him to recognize the big hand on the 12 and the little hand on the three, and so on. He's also enjoying mastering "night" and "day," and will bounce down the stairs in the morning and announce, "It's DAY time!" or inform me that pajamas are for NIGHT time, NOT for DAY time. It's also helping with bedtime, in that I think he's beginning to like submitting to the rhythm of the day or recognizes what the clock looks like or something -- anyway, bedtime is much less of a fight than it used to me.

I am thinking about making a little chart showing the tasks of the day with clock faces next to them. But I will have to laminate it because I know he will carry it around all over the place so he can gaze at it. Shhhh... I found a learn to tell time book that has clock faces and trains. I'm trying to decide whether to give it for Christmas or hold it back for birthday.

Maybe I'll hold it for next week. I don't know if I mentioned that we are indeed travelling to North Dakota for Christmas -- I did find a decent deal on tickets, though not as cheap as I would have liked. We are leaving at the crack of dawn on Christmas Eve. This will be Hambet's first time on an airplane, so I'm a little worried. I plan to have some gum and some things with high novelty and entertainment value at the ready.