Mysteries

Now that Grace is older, there are parts of her life that we are not directly present for, and her life at preschool or Sunday school is pretty opaque to us.  Sometimes we pepper her with questions, trying to elucidate what she does, but these efforts are most often met with failure.  If I ask her what she did at school after I pick her up, her pat answer is, "I played with the other kids."  If I ask her leading questions about playing outside or eating lunch or reading books, she usually responds in the affirmative but I'm never sure if she's not just humoring me.  At times, we do get tiny tidbits of information about her life away from us.   Yesterday at dinner, Rob and I were trying to extract some information about what she did at school and she told us that she had music time when she sang songs with flags.  "Flags?" we thought.  "Maybe like scarves?  They were dancing around with scarves perhaps?"  No, Grace insisted, they were flags.  "With stars and stripes."  Oh, right, THAT kind of flag.  We hypothesize that they were doing some kind of patriotic song because of the inauguration.  When we tried to figure out what song they sang, all we could get out of Grace was her warbling, "No one no one no one no one no one no!"  Such a conundrum...

The riddle that Rob and I spend the most energy trying to solve is the enigma of puppets at Sunday school.  This past autumn Grace moved up from the nursery at church to the preschool area there; she seemed perfectly content about her new class but didn't really tell us anything about it.  We would ask and again, her standard answer was always, "I played with the other kids."  After multiple weeks there, one of our friends from church who has a daughter in the same class as Grace mentioned that she was really rushing that morning to get her little one to Sunday school in time for puppets.  "Puppets?" we asked blankly.  "They do puppets?"  It seemed like something that would have merited a mention, but such was not the case.  Now we always ask Grace about the puppets, but still we know next to nothing.  We ask her what the puppets do-- do they sing? do they tell stories?  And we ask what they are-- an animal? a person?  Grace sometimes answers vaguely in the affirmative but most often she says, "Shhhhhhhh.  We can't talk when we go to puppets."  We really don't know anything about the puppets except that Grace is very aware that you are not to talk.  She did tell us one time that there were boys who WERE talking but that they had to stop.  So now I mainly picture puppets involving a sort-of scary Brad Pitt telling the 2- and 3-year-olds that the first rule of puppets is you do not talk about puppets.