Baa Baa Black Lamb

Abbie’s preschool began a new activity today, and this one has nothing to do with fundraising.* They’re starting the Letter of the Week. Her teachers assigned a letter to every week for the rest of the school year. The letters’ order is seemingly at random; L this week, F next week, E after that, etc. Maybe there’s a handy mnemonic for the order, like “let’s finally eat half that itchy ugly cow over quiet gravy served just dead, probably because Roger killed another very mediocre night with … xylophone yellow zebra.” They saved XYZ for the last three weeks, probably because the teachers don’t want to think of words that start with those letters any more than we do.

Every student should bring something from home to share with the class that begins with that week’s letter. This isn’t a requirement, the instruction sheet said not to worry if we couldn’t find something appropriate, they’ll go on without the item. Presumably we’ll simply be stunting Abbie’s mental development by depriving her the opportunity to intimately know an item that begins with that letter. The item can be anything from a picture to something tangible; the only limitation is it must fit in her backpack. I assume that xylophones will litter her classroom during X week, though I may dig up an old copy of the video game Xenophobe just to be different

With this being L week, we needed something that begins with L. I plan on flipping through the Sunday newspaper ads looking for pictures of most things, but we had the perfect object this week. One of Abbie’s first favorite stuffed animals is a stuffed lamb. She snuggled with it on many naps, and I used it to calm her through many tantrums. I could always make her laugh by pecking the lamb at her cheeks while shouting “lambie kisses!” Eventually this morphed into “flying lambie kisses,” which involved me throwing it at her face in an action that is much less mean-spirited than it sounds.

I dug it out of her stuffed animal basket and showed it to her.

“What is this?” I asked her, hoping that she’d remember from her infanthood.

“A sheep!” she replied.

While technically correct, “sheep” definitely doesn’t begin with L. I walked her through the process a few times, telling her it’s a lamb, lamb begins with L, and L is the letter of the week. After each round, she responded by telling me “that’s a sheep!”

I gave the animal to Abbie, and she toted it around the house for a while. Eventually she walked up to her brothers, pecked it on their cheeks, and yelled “lambie kisses!” Close enough. As long as she did that at preschool, her teachers would know that we didn’t accidentally send something for S week.

This morning she was walking around the house carrying a stuffed turtle. “Turtle begins with T,” she shouted repeatedly. Looks like we’re set for T week.

* For now.