He follows me around, but I don’t really want to keep him.
Somehow I’ve managed to acquire an extra shadow. I wasn’t really looking to, as the one I’ve got serves me well enough, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve got two now.There’s this little kid at my school (okay, there are a lot of them, but this one’s really little) who’s taken a quite a shine to me. I’m not sure why that is, as I wasn’t aware I inspired a lot of admiration in two year olds. He’s only been a student for a little over two months, and when he first started, nobody could stand him. He didn’t want to go to school and didn’t realize what was going on. He just knew that mommy was taking him someplace strange and leaving him there. So he reacted like any little kid would.
By screaming his fucking head off.
Thankfully, he adjusted. What was once a howling mess is now a fun little kid. Once he got over his “screamer” phase, he decided I was his friend. I’m not sure how he picked me, as he’s not in any of my classes. Maybe it’s the “male figure” thing. Maybe it’s that I play with the kids more than the other teachers. I really don’t know.
So now he follows me around when he gets the chance, trying to hold my hand and walk with me and stuff. I guess that’s all pretty normal little-kid stuff.
Then he started imitating me.
One day I was giving a couple kids a bit of a growling for running inside. I was going back and forth pointing from one the other, asking why they were running when I’d just told another kid (identified with more finger pointing) not to run. A couple other kids started laughing, which isn’t the reaction I usually get when I’m using my stern voice. So I look next to me (where their laughter seems to be directed) and what do I see?
This little kid standing there copying what I’m doing. He’s got the same thing going as me – angry look on his face, pointing from one kid to the other.
And he’s doing it damned well.
I can’t help but laugh, which gets him to look up. I ask him what he thinks he’s doing, and he just smiles and laughs.
Cheeky little bugger.
So clearly he’s become my shadow, but where does the “gangsta” bit come into it? Here:
The kids have the preschool equivalent of gym clothes that they wear to the park each day. Part of the getup is a hat (color coded to show which class they’re in). The smallest kids get the red hats, and generally need help changing. No biggie as it’s usually faster to do it for them than to wait while they try to figure out which side is up on their t-shirts. One day I finished up getting my little shadow ready for the park and he kept turning his hat to the side. No matter how many times I spun it back to the front, he’d twist it right back to where he’d had it. At two years old, I’m not sure where he got the idea that this was how one wore a hat, but he seemed rather insistent that this was how he liked his. So I let him sport it like that for a while and snapped the pic.He’s cute (and amusing a lot of the time), but I’m not going to have any of my own. As fun as kids can be at times, there’s always some screaming involved.
Always.