Four toddlers and two ganenot

I don't want to hear a word of complaint from anyone this Shabbat about how difficult their week was. My boiler plate response will be swift and emotionless: Boo hoo for you. I just spent the week filling in for my friend Bracha at her English-speaking gan (nursery school) under the watchful eye of her partner Judy.

Bracha and her family just sashayed off to New York and Disneyland two weeks ago. Every time I checked up on her on Facebook, I found another picture of her and her family having fun with yet another group of old friends living somewhere along the Eastern Seaboard -- people who kept writing things like "she is having so much fun I don't think she is ever going home." Yeah, over my dead body.

My new friends Dundun, Rafi, Shruli, and Zundel, (yes, they all have real names but no one in gan uses them) are so cute you could just scream. You really have to be two-ish to break into song, dance or tears with a split second's notice. And you have to be that age to think that a missing puzzle piece is worthy of a truly heartfelt "oy, oy, oy".

Of course spending your days with such a crew requires various skills I do not use on a day-to-day basis:

• the ability to smell l'eau du poo poo from seven feet away
• the ability to remember the words to songs you haven't sung since your own childhood -- in my case, that included Alouette, Gentille Alouette and Frere Jacques, because while it is an English speaking nursery school, two of the children are native French speakers
• the ability to interpret garbled English (ie: "Doodi" is not No. 2, but rather "Judy" as spoken by a toddler) and baby Hebrew (that was actually quite easy since it sounds like my Hebrew)

And it isn't just a matter of digging into your ancient skills' bag, it's also about having the requisite energy to keep up with the clientele. There's not a lot of sitting around in this sort of job. And asking for a quiet moment is completely out of the question.

Here's a run down on my week's activities:

• I built enough giant Lego towers (which were promptly torn down) to fill an entire new city
• I read the Wiggles "Red Car", "Sesame Street at the Zoo", Susan Boyton's "Dogs" so many times that I lost count somewhere after 1000 readings
• I know what happened to Grover's marbles and Zoe's ball
• I wiped at least 100 noses
• I set up for snack and cleaned up afterwards five times
• And did the same for lunch
• I answered the question "ma zeh" (what's that) when the little guy really meant "mi  at" (who are you) at least 100 times
• I said "bye, bye, see you later" to pretend exiters 100s of times
• I searched for the same missing "eggies"  and cupcakes at least 10 times
• I found the missing eggies and cupcakes (and a missing red plastic telephone) each time they went missing

You know I could keep going but I will spare you the rest of the list.

So what did I learn? You know there had to be a lesson in all of this.

I learned that you have to be one wrung on the ladder higher than a saint to spend your days with little kids. This is not a job for the feint of heart.