The countdown is on!

No, not the Harry Potter one - that one's been and gone and J's currently reading the book in the bedroom. The real countdown is that Chickie starts school Monday morning.

How is it possible that he's old enough to go to school now? I know he's ready for it. His teacher at the childcare centre tells me he's completely ready academic wise. They're doing this Letterland thing and he's just soaking it up like a sponge. They've only been doing it a few weeks and he spelt out the word Myer today, while shopping (and technically they're only up to the letter F!). She also says he's very social and will probably find it very easy to make friends.

We've bought clothes for him to wear. The school's dress code is navy, red and white. So far we have lots of navy stuff and a few red things. It was actually really hard to find stuff for him in navy, in his size. There was plenty of grey around but hardly anything in navy. I managed to find two pairs of navy school uniform type pants (one in size 4 which will only fit for a while, and one in size 5) and as a back up, he has two pairs of cord navy pants. This is just not the time to be looking for winter clothing - all the summer stuff is starting to come out!

Anyway, all the new clothes have been washed and hopefully it will be enough to keep him reasonably clothed.

We've been practising opening lunch containers. He's not finding that so easy - some of the new containers we've bought are a bit stiff still. Hopefully they'll loosen up soon and in the mean time we've bought some resealable plastic bags that he finds easier.

His lunch is probably going to be a bit boring to start with. He's decided all he wants on his sandwiches is either vegemite or ham. He likes the idea of Vita-Weat crackers with vegemite and either bananas or apples for fruit.

My sister suggested I don't get into the habit of sending muesli bars, sultanas or fruit rollups (basically any sort of 'sticky' type foods), since one of her boys ended up with 9 fillings in his first year of school. She said the dentist told her it's often because the kids don't always drink enough water to rinse the food from their teeth. Chickie doesn't seem to drink very much at home, to me (he does actually like water though, thank goodness), so I think perhaps I might take that advice and only send those types of things occasionally. Though, once he actually goes and sees what the other kids eat... things could be different.

So, am I ready for this? Um no... he's my little baby! He's too little for school!