A Head Start

The concept of young children (ages 2-3) going to preschool is very odd to me. The only preschool I had was Head Start the year before kindergarten. I LOVED Head Start.

If you do not know, Head Start is a preschool for poor people. All the kids in my class had similar family and financial situations as my mom and I did. I would like to say that leveled the playing field but it really didn't. It operated as normal preschools I suppose. There was a "rich," popular girl, a smelly kid, a weird kid, a dumb kid, bunch of nondescript kids, and me the redheaded kid. Sad to say there were even "cliques" in head start, but they existed. If that was happening in the 80s I shudder to think about preschools today.

I believe a day went like this:

Bus picked me up, first part of the day was learning and singing, then we had lunch, the recess, then more lessons, and bus ride home.

I have always been a big fan of recess. We always had recess indoors. I remember the wooden monkey bars that had to illegal because let me tell you it was not very sturdy. I remember it falling completely on top of a kid named Kenny. He had really curly hair and always had snot coming out of his nose. I didn't like him very much...but I digress. There were tricycles and blocks...the usual. We also had parties like normal preschools.

I can remember our Christmas party that happened 29 years ago. I am sure that the organization solicited donations to give all of us kids a good Christmas. Santa even came to give us our gifts. That was pretty exciting! That movie Elf has it right, everyone screams SANTA when you see the big guy. Our parents were there and we had a Christmas lunch. Seems totally normal right? Wrong. The thing that made this a disaster is that not all the gifts were created equal.

This was back in the rage of Cabbage Patch kids. I can't remember exactly how many girls there were in my class but all of us got this tiny Cabbage Patch that had Velcro on in and had a house thing... and there was one regular sized Cabbage Patch that went to....the "rich" girl.

It's so crazy that I remember this and remember how all of the rest of us girls cried. It wasn't fair and honestly it really wasn't. I firmly believe in the concept that in a large group setting kids must be treated equal. I also firmly believe that if one kid fucks everything up, that it ruins it for everyone. We have to teach kids how to function in a group, how to behave, how to share, how to treat their peers as equals.

So if you are having a little kid Christmas party...remember to make it equal. Some of them will remember this shit.