Last week was Back-to-School Night at Eleanor’s preschool. You didn’t know preschools had them, but now you do.

Part of Eleanor’s program is that her teacher helps the kids to keep “journals” to track their progress. Basically, the teacher asks the kids to draw whatever they want, and then to describe their pictures. Here’s our favorite journal entry:

These are Eleanor’s snakes.

Aren’t they awesome? We were really impressed. They are very clearly snakes, you guys. So good!

Other projects include painting with pasta (still not entirely sure what that means, but it apparently it happens). Here Eleanor depicts the aftermath of the Mississippi overflowing:

Pasta painting explained (I still don’t get it, but it looks delicious).

And of course, a face gluing. I think this is supposed to be me, during my peacock phase a couple months ago.

So preschool gets a pass, as they convinced us that they aren’t torturing our daughter and that she is actually having a pretty entertaining and edu-ma-cational time. We already knew that of course, by the way that Eleanor frequently throws a fit and refuses to leave school at pick-up time. We really like Eleanor’s teachers, and the way they refer to the kids as “friends” (it took us a little while to figure out they were talking about one of the kids when they were telling us a story about the lunch one of their “friends” was eating the other day). And it was revealed that it was in fact her teachers that were slipping Eleanor gummies! Busted! They were pretty proud of Eleanor for covering for them though, and it seemed like a bonding moment for teacher and “friend.”