Open House

We went to an Open House this morning for what is to be the boy's preschool this coming fall. It was so much fun! We had taken a tour of the school in December, but it was so much more fun to see our little boy discovering everything and figuring out how to play with all of it. He absolutely loved it.

I must admit that I wish I was 3 again just so I could play on that playground. I found myself touching and playing with everything and uncontrollably blurting out, "Wow, Cool!!!" "Hey, check this out!" "Hey, come on, it's MY turn!" (ok, I didn't actually say that last one...)

Along with all the standard playground equipment - the fort thing that you climb up and slide down, monkey bars, bouncy horses, swing set, etc. - there are all these additional areas in which the kids can play. There's a water-play area, an old row boat suspended by heavy-duty elastic, a house with a kind of porch behind it with a pass-through to the house, a sandbox, a free-standing clear piece of plastic on which the kids can paint to their heart's content, a wooden fire truck that you can either sit in and drive, or stand up on the seat, turn around, and slide down the back of it to the ground, and a compost tumbler (we do live in the tree-hugger part of town, you know, which works out well for us being kind of tree-huggerish, too, and all). But the pièce de résistance: a boomin' area. It is truly heaven on earth for preschoolers.

The cool thing that we liked about this preschool was that it's a "cooperative preschool" which means that the parents are the ones responsible for pretty much everything. There's a board of directors comprised of only parents and every parent is expected to "work" at the school once every 15 days (or something like that). As I walked around the playground this morning, I realized how evident it was that the parents of all these children had created this interactive learning center for their kids.

I just can't wait until Fall and the beginning of the school year!