Starting School on 09-09-09

If Adam was old enough to realize it, he'd have loved that today is 09-09-09, because he's always possessed a little more than the average need to have organization and order. Sadly, this need doesn't seem to apply to his bedroom, but rather to the little things in life, like how I arrange the candles in my decorating. (I've learned that I just can't split up sets; he will rearrange them on a daily basis to make sure the candles that should go together do go together.)


Today was his first day of school, which I had decided not to blog about. But I quickly changed my mind when I picked him up today. At his preschool, the whole class walks in a line to the front doors where they are then handed over to the appropriate adults. Since Adam's name is so early in the alphabet, he gets to be at the head of the line on the first day of school (2 years running). Right away, I noticed the beaded necklace he'd made. I thought it was a really cute project, and that the teachers probably instructed the kids to group them by color, and maybe even to count out a certain number of beads. Then I noticed the normal 4 year old's necklaces. They were not grouped by color. The charms were not evenly spaced. They looked as if they had a great time just stringing things on in whatever order they happened to pick them up. I reiterate that I consider this behavior normal.


Kirk and I are collecting a file of evidence to hand over to Adam when someday he realizes his weird need for order is precisely that: weird. We want to make sure he knows that we did not do this to him. He came to us this way. So far we have pictures of a gingerbread house with the candies separated by type and placed in straight lines. We have pictures of Christmas ornaments which had to be grouped by color so they'd have friends. Today, we'll add this:

Oh, and one thing I didn't notice until Adam pointed it out. "Mom, the apple is next to the red beads because it is red. The pencil is next to the yellow beads because it is yellow. I had to put the chalkboard next to the green beads because there were no black beads."