In a few short weeks Paloma will start preschool and Diego will start kindergarten. They could be going to the same school, but they won't be.

    I am in love with my son's school: a Montessori-ish private run by ex-public school teachers that wanted to teach instead of do constant testing. They started their own school when every child in California started to be left behind. The school has a preschool-8th grade and lots of interaction between all students at all levels. They get to celebrate holidays and multiculturalism without it getting hokey or stupid.

    But it also costs some serious cash money. 

    He started at the public preschool but they required parents to volunteer (I hate being in a classroom with other people's kids for long periods of time--that's why I teach college instead--I'd sooner have a truck run over my head). And often the kids on the playground would be a little too world wise for my taste. Like the day I heard "my daddy arrested your daddy last night for drugs." My son, as his teacher's attest to, has a certain element of innocence that we are all trying to keep preserved just a little while longer. He is a sweet boy and fundamentally is clueless as to why some kids are jerks and their parents allow them to be so.

    Enter our daughter, Miss Paloma. Perhaps it should have been an early clue that she entered the world knowing how to breast feed and that my husband and the doctor literally almost dropped her as she shot out of the birth canal. She was ready from day one for everything. She began speaking at nine months and has been depressed for a year that no one wanted to take her at preschools yet because she was too young (ability to recognize the ABCs, speak in Spanish and Japanese once in awhile and photographic memory not withstanding).

    Paloma gives off this vibe that you could stick her in the inner city with a thousand kids in a class room and leave her for an hour. You 'd come back and she'll have either started her own gang or organized everyone into vassals to her queen. It's not that we haven't tried to break her spirit--but she is who she is and as long as she is polite and courteous and not a brat, we let her be.

    Perhaps next year we'll revisit the decision to stick her in the preschool where she'll meet all the kids from the community rich or poor, the kids of both the cops and the drug dealers, the kids whose mothers are thirteen, etc., but if this summer is any indication, she can handle her own.

    On a playground in Penn Park in Whittier, California earlier this June, Paloma was counting her numbers in Spanish when four white kids that looked about sixth grade age caught ear of her. She was waiting for the swings; they were on the seesaw.

    "Go back to Mexico, you little alien," taunted one boy as the others laughed and I scrambled up from my park bench across the way but she was faster than I was. Paloma walked right up to the boy and shook her fist. 

    "I'm not an alien, I'm a little girl. And you are bad, mean kids!" Then, satisfied with her response she walked to me.

    "Mommy? What's an alien?"

    "Someone from outer space."

    "Those were mean kids."

    "Yes, they were." 

    So far she only uses her powers for good. And I think public school--especially around here--could really, really, use her.