Getting Ahead of Ourselves

Elsa and I have been taking classes at the Milwaukee Zoo for one year now, and this week Elsa moved up to the 3-year-old classes. When we originally started the classes last summer, I fudged Elsa's birthday just a little, putting it down as "June 8, 2006," in order to get her into the classes earlier, and so that she could be in more classes with Karina, whose birthday is in January. At the time, I didn't think twice about it—I never imagined there would be consequences to sneaking a 22-month-old into a class for 2-year-olds.

Unfortunately for us, our zoo is both a stickler for age limits, and extremely organized. They keep good records there, and I think Elsa's fake birthday is going to follow her throughout her life, as far as the zoo is concerned. As a result, we'll be moving up a level two months early every year. Not that a few months will ever make much of a difference, and again, it keeps us in more classes with Karina. But as we walked into our first 3-year-old class this week, Tanya mentioned that they sometimes actually ask the kids how old they are. So, I coached Elsa a little—I told her that if the teacher asks how old she is, she should say that she's 3.

So we went into the 3-year-old room, and as the teacher was giving Elsa her name tag, she asked, "Elsa, did you just have your birthday?" Elsa (with a perfectly straight face, and without even a glance at me): "Yes." Teacher: "And how old are you now?" Elsa: "I'm three!" I suddenly wondered what monster I may have just created. I encouraged my child to lie, and guess what? She's good at it. Oops.

But there was no doubt that Elsa was ready for 3-year-old class, that's for sure. First of all, as I glanced around, I noticed that even though she's not yet 3, she's already taller than most of the other kids in the class, including the boys! Second, her "class work" was just as advanced, if not more so, than the other kids. She is absolutely meticulous when it comes to painting inside the lines—when all of the kids' paintings were hanging up to dry side-by-side, hers was far and away the neatest of the bunch (not that that should be the only measure of success in preschool art, but still). Check out her last two masterpieces (the hippo is all brown because they were supposed to be "covering him with mud").