Advanced for His Age

Recently, I dropped Niko off at his M-W-F preschool and I was handed an incident report to sign. At this school reports are written up if something happens to the child or they've done something to another child. Sometimes they're as simple as Niko fell on the playground, or he pushed one of his classmates. But this one was more serious: he bit a kid.

It's pretty common for really young kids to bite because they lack the skills to communicate their needs. When he was a toddler, Gus was a big biter. His Oma, Liesel Schlosser, taught me how to break him of it: bite him back. It worked. But Niko was well beyond the age of biting being an option.

As I signed the report, I told the teaching assistant that I was perplexed that this type of bad behavior exists only at this school, and is nowhere to be found at his T - Th preschool at the University. I also noted these observations on the "comments" portion of the report.

Later that day I received an email from the school's director. She offered several hypothetical reasons for the different behavior at the two schools: class sizes, dynamics of the children, physical size of the classrooms, boy / girl ratios. All very legitimate.

She went on to describe how she saw Niko: "independent," "strong willed," "imaginative" and "rough and tumble." Maybe it was my reading of the email, but it seemed like she was describing his faults. Funny thing is we see these as some of his best attributes.

But here's the kicker: she said Niko is "very advanced for his age in teasing." Yes, you read that correctly. He's advanced in teasing. When I told this story to some family members, my cousin Apostoli nailed it, "Hey, Niko teases at a third-grade level."

How do I respond to that? "Lucky thing he's a good teaser or in our family he'd be crying instead of laughing all the time!"

I mean just look at the below photo Kelly took the other day at the ice rink: Is that the face of an advanced teaser? Wait, don't answer that...