Sandi Kahn Shelton - Preschool Confidential

Welcome to being the parent of a preschool child. I know youre tired, but think of this: At least youve survived teething, colic, and walking around in public with spit-up on all your clothing. By now, you have changed 49 million stinky diapers (20 million of those in public) and have learned to get your required sleep in ten-second intervals between wails.

And now your kid is three and verbal and also fairly certain shes ready to get her own apartment, now that she no longer looks like Dwight Eisenhower. She just has a few questions for you before she signs the lease.

Why do people have red cars? Mommy! Are red cars working cars? Do cows think about red cars? Sometimes? Why is that man crossing the street? Why dont we have all the cars in the world at our house? Why, Mommy? Why is that boy walking? What are all the fishes doing right now? What about mans who fix roofs? Do mans who fix roofs know their phone number? Why? Do bad guys get lots of ice cream? Can we kill bad guys if we want to? Why, Mommy? Will bad guys kill us? How many bugs are there? If our roof breaks, will we know the mans phone number?

Naturally you dont have the answers to any of these questions. Even if youre relatively certain you could find a roofers telephone number if you needed one, by the time that one semi-rational question gets asked, you are so baffled by the stream of consciousness of the earlier questions that you are quite speechless and looking for a place to curl up and take a nap.

Someoneprobably now in a padded cell somewhereonce documented the fact that preschoolers ask 437 questions a day. We cant know how this research was accomplished, but somehow I cant get the image out of my head of a beleaguered scientist, bug-eyed and holding a clicker and tallying up the questions until he dropped to the floor in a coma. Sometimes science requires the ultimate sacrifice.

Anyway, it should be noted that 437 per day was simply the average number of questions. Many childrenprobably yours includedask this many before breakfast. By the time they have a good head of steam goingsay, around 11:00 A.M., they can easily crank the total up to over a thousand on a good day. As to the fate of the researchers, I think the chances are good that they are probably living on a desert island somewhere, hoping that no one finds them and asks them anything ever again.

But dont worry. You might think that 437 questions is too many for you personally to handle; you may think that after Question #300, for instance, you might start checking the want ads to see if the merchant marines are hiring these days. But you only rarely see parents going off on overseas assignments. Nature mercifully arranges it that after Question #246, your brain goes numb and you hardly even mind after that. In fact, youll discover that there are stock answers that seem to work for most questions. Even with your eyes glazed over, you can deliver the old standbys:

I dont think so.

My, that would be amazing!

No one really knows.

We cant because were civilized humans.

Because I said so, and Im bigger than you are.

Once you master rotating these simple phrases, believe me, you can turn off your brain and try to regain some sense of who it was you used to be before you had children. I know, I know. Its incredible that just five simple phrases can totally take care of all your conversational needs, but its true. Just be sure that you dont start agreeing to things without really grasping whats been said to you. Once my friend Paul found hed agreed to turn on the washing machine with the hamster inside.

Thats what having a little child is like. You find yourself uttering phrases that you cant believe you would ever saythings like, If you dont stop jumping on the kitchen counter with Barbies leg in your hand, youre going to put out your eye and then I wont take you to the circus.

Besides learning some stock phrases, there are other skills youre going to acquire, too, things you didnt ever think youd need to learn but now find indispensable to getting along in the world. Getting a kid out of a toy store, for instance, is of paramount importance, and youd like it if the legal authorities didnt get called in to observe just how you do this. You learn after a while to master the Surprise Exitsuddenly whirling around and picking up your child and, while talking nonstop in a bright, almost pharmaceutically enhanced voice, charging out of the toy store full speed ahead with the kid in a football hold under your arm. If youre lucky, it wont be until youre halfway home that the kid catches his breath and realizes hes been swindled out of a perfectly good screaming opportunity.

Oh, youre going to get good at a lot of new things: Glaring While Smiling, which is the art of warning your child of some dire consequence while appearing to the public to be having a perfectly lovely conversation. And saying, Do. Not. Do. That. Again, in the precise tone of voice that your mother used. You might even find a use for that old chestnut: Stop crying, or Ill give you something to cry about!a statement that means absolutely nothing but is pleasantly ominous just the same.