This week, my Bride & I went to our first "parent's orientation" meeting at the Critter's new school. You know, the Chilton of Chester. (Please study your Gilmore Girls references here.) Meeting our co-parents this time was much less like the pit-fighting montage in Conan the Barbarian than our first meeting. We all smiled at one another and gave congratulatory high-fives and back-slaps to each other, to celebrate our kids making it through the assessment. Or rather, we would have, except the other parents were English. And the English don't 'high-five'. Instead, we gathered in the hall and had very civilized glasses of wine and sparkling water, and various bruschetta with cream cheese and sea creatures. We looked at the adorable little uniforms, and talked to the French teacher (French? Zut alors! The kid's only just turned four!). Most of the parents gathered in little groups, having met previously because they have other daughters at the school, or because they're neighbors, etc. Not having a similar connection, my Bride and I sat off to one side a bit until the headmistress took pity on the American couple (busily high-fiving and back-slapping each other), and came over and talked to us for a while. We were eventually herded back into the library, where they walked us through a powerpoint presentation on the "Queen's School Approach to Education," along with their expectations for us parents. Among other things, we learned that they are 'quite fussy' about the proper way to hold a pen or use phonetics, and our daughters were likely to come home and correct us on how we've been doing it wrong all these years, and that our duty was to agree and promise to do better. Then we got to the things that we were to make sure our daughters were able to do before she started: Headmistress: Please make sure your daughter knows how to put on her own shoes before starting school in September No problem. We've been slip-on or velcro fans from way back. Headmistress: Please make sure your daughter knows how to use her fork and knife The Critter is clearly a genius. She's been eating with her own utensils for years. She can even use chopsticks if we hold them together with a rubberband. Headmistress: Please make sure your child knows how to do up her own buttons Alright. The Critter isn't great at this, but with a little practice, she'll improve. Headmistress: Please make sure your daughter [drops to stage whisper]can wipe her own bottom[/whisper]. Oh. Crap. Alright, I admit it. Our daughter still yells out across the house to have an adult come wipe her tush after she makes number two. Look, she was three until a second ago, and frankly, both my Bride and I think we already spend too much time dealing with the whole small-person-bodily-function area, so we've maybe not placed the emphasis on it we should have. I'm pretty confident the Critter gets the principle, but just isn't prepared to handle the execution. There were some other requirements, but frankly they all faded to insignificance after I heard this one. I turned to my Bride with a look of dread. So now we're left with basically three months to train our daughter how to use toilet paper (but not too much toilet paper. She has a tendency to think that if a little is good, a lot much be better, much to our plumber's gratification) and clean herself. Thank God self-cleaning bottoms wasn't part of the assessment process, or she'd never have gotten in...

The Critter is 4 years old this week. 4 years ago, my Bride and I had no idea what we were about to get in to. Sleep deprivation. A ridiculous portion of our Tivo being dedicated to the latest episode of "The Doodlebops." A hugely disproportionate amount of time dealing with, encouraging, or the discussion of bowel movements. We didn't know this because the Critter came 6 weeks early and we had not taken any of the courses. I was a little surprised that they let us take her home, even without our certificate of course completion. To celebrate the Critter managing to survive another full year without breaking any major limb or driving us to either the nut- or poor-house, we bought her a new bike. Still with training wheels ("stabilizers" in Brit-speak), and sent her out the door to race the neighbor kid. We also got her a copy of Tangoes Jr. Sadly, she's already better than her mother at it. Even better, we're busy planning another musical beer-and-meat-fest. The 2nd Annual Cheshire Bluegrass BBQ. This Time With A Whole Pig. Me: What do you want to do for your 4th birthday, sweetheart? Critter: I'd like another barbeque, please. Me: Are you sure? You wouldn't like a princess party, or something like that? Critter: No, Father. I'd like a barbeque. With more pig. And a bluegrass band. Me: It's your birthday, sweetheart, so we'll do whatever you want. Critter: Thank you, sir. And can you please make sure that the beer is extra cold for you and our guests? That would make my birthday complete. Me: That's my girl. Because nothing says "I'm 4" like grilled pork and banjos. She'll be the envy of all her classmates.

A few people have asked me in the past few months for an update on the Critter's school situation. You may remember that she went to have her worthiness assessed at a few of the local schools nearby. To hedge our bets, we had taken her to a couple of different schools for assessment, both of which are only a few blocks from each other pretty close to the Chester city center. We started with our second choice - a kind of Montessori-esque school with a really good arts and music program. It was nice, and my bride and I had gone there without the Critter to take a look around and talk to the teachers. I've never been completely sold on the whole express-your-uniqueness, finger-painting with your neighbors snot == learning school of thought, but the kids seemed reasonably happy, and they had a good lunch program. On the other hand, something about paying > £1,000 a term and having your child's classroom be a 'mobile unit' (a.k.a. trailer home. I'm from Georgia - I know a trailer home when I see one) bothers me. When we took the Critter there for her assessment, the first thing out of her mouth was "This isn't Queen's." OK, so maybe we had talked up the other school a bit too much to get her excited about the whole process. And taking her to the Queen's open-house, but skipping the other ones might have biased her in that direction. We had a quick conversation in the parking lot about the importance of not saying "This isn't Queen's" to the nice assessor-lady. In the end, she was accepted at the first school, and we felt good about the fact that our daughter would receive some form of education next year. The next week, we took her to the Queen's assessment. Queen's is the opposite of Montessori. It's all about structure and expectations and makes my I-went-to-the-former-Georgia-military-academy skin break out in goose-bumps all over. Yeah sure, they empower the kids to make decisions, and promote creativeness, but I suspect they might also sing jody calls as they walk between classes. The library where they stuck all the parents while the kids were being evaluated was larger, but also more crowded. We recognized a couple of the parents from the other assessment, and gave each other grudging nods. It was like we had sent our children off to a pit-fight, and we parent-trainers were all rooting for our own children to do the pre-school equivalent of a chair-to-the-head/double-windmill-atomic-clothesline combo to the competition (i.e. the other three and four year olds). We covered by being extremely polite to each other. Two parents who accidentally brushed one another in the doorway spent nearly ten minutes begging the other's pardon. At the end of an hour, the assessment was over, and we collected our Critter. We managed to wait all the way until we were in the parking lot before we turned on the inquisition - "Did you have fun?" "What did they ask you?" "Did you play?" "Did you demonstrate that you can already recite the early works of Walt Whitman like Daddy's been teaching you and that you get your shoes on the right foot without any help three times out of five?" The Critter shrugged and said "They gave us juice!" A few days later we got a call saying that our little half-raccoon was accepted on the "alternate" list for Queen's. All in all, I felt halfway decent about that. Our Critter is on the young end of the spectrum (her birthday being in June means she's destined to be one of the youngest in the class, so her co-assessees had an additional 6-10 months of development on her). We had our alternate already in the bag, so life was ok. I continued to rationalize this way until the weeping stopped. About four weeks later, we received another call, however, saying that the Critter was now officially accepted. Apparently some parents had either decided the school was not quite right, or too far away, or whatever. I didn't ask too many questions. The Grady progeny is now a Queen's girl! The irony here is that last year while on vacation, I had read The Ivy Chronicles, a collection of stories about insane parents trying to get their kid into their preferred school. I have now joined a 12 step program and support group.