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The next day Mom brought me back to preschool and asked the teacher if I could have my cubby back. I just hope your academic record doesn't follow you around, because it might be tough for me to get a good job later on if people find out I was kindergarten dropout. Monday I'm pretty sure Mom decided that whatever she tried with me when I was little didn't work out, because she's taking a totally different approach with Manny. For starters, Mom pretty much lets Manny watch whatever he wants on TV. So he keeps it on this show called "The Snurples" twenty-four hours a day.

I tried to watch "The Snurples" a few times, but had NO idea what was going on. The Snurples have their own language that I guess only three-year-olds can understand. After Manny watches the show, he gets frustrated when no one in our family can understand him.

But the other day Mom read an article in the newspaper that said watching "The Snurples" actually sets kids back about a year with their language development and messes up their social skills, too. Well, that explains a lot. Manny doesn't have any real friends, and whenever Mom holds playgroup at our house, Manny is the only one who doesn't interact with the other kids. I think part of the issue is that Manny doesn't like to share his toys. So when kids come over, Manny locks himself inside our old dog Sweetie's exercise pen and keeps his toys all to himself.

And whenever Mom tries to get Manny to play with other kids on his OWN, it backfires. At our church they have this new thing where they send all the little kids down to the basement during the service so they can play and color. But the first time Mom dropped Manny off downstairs, there was only one other kid in the play area, and he told Manny he was a vampire. I felt a little bad for Manny because I had to deal with a scary kid when I was his age, too. I was stuck in preschool with this boy named Bradley who terrorized me every chance he got.

I told Mom about Bradley every day when I came home, and said I didn't want to go to school anymore. But that summer Bradley and his family moved away, so the problem took care of itself. After Bradley moved, Mom wrote a story called "Bad Bradley", about a kid who always misbehaves. Bradley was a bad kid in real life, but in Mom's version he was pretty much the devil. I think Mom was actually gonna try and get her story published, but Bradley and his family moved BACK

into our neighborhood the next spring, so she had to scrap it. Even though Mom never got her Bad Bradley story published, she used it to teach Manny about how you're supposed to behave in preschool. And I think that's one of the reasons Manny is so afraid of other kids his own age. Manny may not have any REAL friends, but he has a bunch of IMAGINARY one. I've kind of lost count of