Preschoolers get a brand new Benny Bear backpack.  Babies and toddlers get tote bags, so graduating to a big-kid backpack has been much anticipated.

On February 11th, Kayleigh moved up from Early Preschool II to Preschool.  The 3 year olds class, even though she's a couple of months shy.  She was more than ready and for weeks had been missing her closest friends who had already moved up to Preschool.  Kayleigh had been spending time over in Preschool because the teacher over there loves her and always requests that Kayleigh go over there because she's just a popular girl who's one of the most well-behaved!  It's funny for us to hear how Kayleigh is consistently the model student - following instructions well, mature, social, overall good kid. 

One criteria for preschool is being potty trained and Kayleigh was more than ready.  In fact, she is the only kid in Early Preschool II who has never had an accident. 

I never mentioned how the whole potty training experience went with Kayleigh, so maybe I'll summarize it here.  It was very different from Abby's, but completely stress-free and easy.  Abby potty trained at 2 yrs 9 months, approximately, but because she started so late, she was ready and it took a day and a half for her to be completely day and night trained.  With Kayleigh, around 2 yrs 4 months, she one day decided she wanted nothing to do with diapers.  So we said ok.  At school she had already used the potty a few times and knew what to do.  A few days went by of her going back and forth between diapers and underwear.  At daycare, she was in diapers, but at home she just wore underwear.  Things went pretty well.  A lot of successes and a few accidents, but no one stressed about it.  She had trouble knowing when to anticipate BMs and that took a month before she nailed it, but again, no major accidents. All in all, it took her just a little over a month to be full-time in underwear with no accidents.  What was nice about her potty training was that we never had to push her; it was completely self-directed.  On her second week in Early Preschool II, her teacher asked if we wanted to try having her come to school without diapers because she had been staying dry all day.  We had only tried no diapers a couple of times at that point, but if the teachers were brave enough for it we could give it a try.  As I mentioned before, Kayleigh never had an accident in that class, so by the school's standard she was probably the easiest kid in the world to potty train!  The only time she gave the teachers worry was when she decided she didn't need to go every 15 minutes as was their schedule for the newly trained.  When she decided to stop, she would only go when she needed, which meant just about twice during the school day.  The teachers were expecting her to explode by the end of the day, so kept warning me during pick-up, but of course she was fine, just being the non-conformist, self-assertive Kayleigh that we know.

Anyway, Kayleigh has adjusted extremely well to preschool.  She loves her classmates, she loves her new teachers, and she comes home announcing she has so much fun at school, so all is well.

This will be the last full-time class Kayleigh will experience at Primrose.  In the fall, she will be joining Abby at the Montessori school.  Both girls will most likely still attend Primrose for no school days or long breaks when we will not be able to take time off from work; we will be relying on school camps and Primrose still.