Since it is the end of the preschool year, Lisa had a parent-teacher conference with the kids' teachers. I was unable to attend the meeting due to work, but I figured how long could it really take to talk about what three year olds do all day long. They play. They eat. They sleep. They go home. Thirty seconds tops, right? Nope! The conference was 45 minutes per child for a total of 90 minutes!
I won't bore you with a 90 minute description of the conference -- unlike what Lisa did with me. But the overall picture is that the kids are doing pretty well at school. They both show independence, yet they also socialize with the other children. They like the other children, and the other children seem to like our kids. And they are both active members in the Key Club, JV basketball, and ROTC.
The interesting thing about Emma is that she has taken on the role of a mediator and teacher in her class. If she sees two kids fighting, she will intervene and try to mediate the situation. If it is time to clean up the room, she will not only clean up her mess, but she will help the other children clean up. If she sees a kid misbehave repeatedly, she will write up a note and send him to the principal's office.
As for Andrew, he seems to be a typical boy: active, curious, and unfocused. I don't necessarily know if being unfocused is a characteristic of guys in general because I have always believed that the Star Wars prequel took a major step backwards when it introduced my new Tivo Premiere to the back of my television with an HDMI cable. Hmm...now what was I saying?
But the major outcome of the conference is that we are going to take the teacher's advice and get Andrew tested for speech. He has always been behind with his language skills when compared to Emma, but he has continually improved month after month. It really wasn't until he entered preschool and heard other kids his age talk when we began to wonder if we needed to get a speech assessment for him.
It's actually very common for twins to have speech/language development problems, and more so for boys. I'm not too sure why boys have more difficulty, but I'd have to say it could be due to the fact girls tend to do all of the talking for them and don't know how to shut up.
Now I say this half-jokingly, but I might be to blame because I actually had speech therapy for eight years as a child. I don't think Andrew is as bad as I was when he was my age, but our teacher thinks he just needs an articulation/enunciation tune-up. I will keep you up-to-date with Andrew's speech evaluation, but if I can do speech therapy for eight years and turn out the way I turned out, I don't think Andrew has anything to worry about.
P.S. Lisa just read the last sentence and is extremely anxious and nervous for some reason...
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