Mum-Mum: “You guys! Why do I have to tell you the same thing over and over? How come every morning you make noise and I have to come in and tell you to be quiet because Sam is still sleeping? Why can’t you remember and just do it?”

Nate: “Because we just can’t! We’re widdle boys, Mum-Mum!”

Nate wanders into the room, dragging a toy broom and a plastic workbench leg.

Nate: “Dada, what if I said ‘Three Popcorn Leg’? And then… and then you said ‘Three Popcorn Leg!’”

Dada: “I don’t know…”

Nate, turning and leaving: “Three Popcorn Leg.”

Dada: “…how to answer that, man.”

Dada: “What were you doing?”

Liam: “We were fighting Sam!”

Dada: “Do you think I want you fighting Sam?”

Liam: “I wasn’t the one fighting him. I was the one blocking him so Nate could get him.”

“Hey Dada?”

“Yeah, buddy.” I answer automatically, typing without looking up.

“I love you.”

I stop typing. Smiling now, I turn to him. “I love you too, Nate.”

After a slight pause, he holds up his finger. “But did you see my booger?”

So the two big boys are now in school, as seen below on each of their orientation days - getting into the car for Liam’s, and man-handling Sam’s umbrella stroller for Nate’s.

In a statement that would undoubtedly warm the hearts of all overworked preschool teachers everywhere who do it for the simple reward of shaping and influencing young minds, Liam told us that he likes his new class better “because it has different toys”. He’ll actually tell you what he’s done that day if you ask him within the first 30 seconds of picking him up. After that, his standard response is, “Um, I don’t remember that.” I’ve resorted to turning it into a game and asking him to tell me one thing that happened in preschool that’s true, and one thing that’s NOT true, then letting me guess which is which. So I get a little information and at the same time, teach him to lie convincingly.

Nate, after helping to drop Liam off all last year, is simply happy to be able to now stay. Jill used to find him trying to hang up his coat and sit down at the activity tables. She’d help him back on with it and tell him that he’d get to go to Big Boy School next year. So now it’s next year, he’s the “Biiiig THREE!” (holding up three fingers), and he gets to stay. It’s his class this time, and he has his own hook. He brought home a little class photo, framed with popsicle sticks and generously glued-on pumpkin seeds. In it, he’s definitely the happiest kid in the picture, and he’s not even the one picking his nose.

And so begins a lifetime of calendar-based adherence to a repetitive daily schedule dictated by the clock and seeded with the occasional small block of cheese.

Welcome to society, boys!

Day One: Liam

Day Two: Nate

“Look Dada… I have a breast!”

That’s an actual quote.

Nate’s like Yankee Doodle, except instead of a cap and a feather and macaroni, he’s got a t-shirt and walnuts. And boobs.