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STOP!
When Your Tiny Tot Starts Zooming Down the Highway
From co-op preschool to college in minutes
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The two truisms of parenting are:
- It gets easier!,
- Our children’s childhoods go too fast.
As our daughter — our third child, Easter — graduates high school, I’m more certain than ever that point #1 is all wrong. But the second must be a truth immutable.
Our first three kids were born in Seattle, where education is a religion, and early childhood development classes and PEPS groups are the gathering place for its celebrants, new parents. There, heavy parent involvement was the only road to salvation and the One True Way of motherhood.
I got caught up in that cult — a (relatively) benign one, and a boon to our family.
We had rituals. “Zoom Down the Highway!” was a chant we often would do in John’s toddler class. Wes was just an infant, not even two months old when we started co-op — and Easter, our daughter, wasn’t even a sperm yet. It was hard to babywear Wes at circle time while balancing a 15-month-old John on my lap to do the little knee rides and ditties we sang together. But somehow I knew not to let us miss out. We made…
