israeli ramblings

My 3-year-old son does not go to gan (preschool). Now I know a lot of people seem to have a problem with it and think that I am causing him undue suffering (and boredom). He likes to play with the neighbor's son, who is the same age, and who goes to gan until 4, and is generally picked up by the live-in babysitter. Today I went over there to track down my older son, and I asked the grandmother where the little boy would be going to gan. I added that I heard a rumor that the city was planning on operating the municipal "ganim" until 4, instead of 1:20. At this point the father stepped into the conversation. You have to understand that he's barely said a word to me since he called me when we were working on the apartment and accused my electrician of stealing electricity from his apartment. He was also quite nasty to the workers themselves. So now he asks me what I said about the ganim, and I repeated it. Before I know it, he is ranting away about mothers who want to send their children to gan until 1PM instead of 4PM for their OWN NEEDS, and his older children went to gan until 1, and the youngest goes until 4 and he's a thousand times more independent. So I said, very calmly, that everyone has to make their own decisions about their own children. Before I finished the sentence he started talking about how happy his son is in gan and he is dying to stay there until 4 and why should he be bored at home. Sigh. Maybe I should stop sending him over there, but I guess that would somehow be meeting my own needs and not his? Maybe toddlers should go to boarding gan? It's kind of like the people who say breastfeeding mothers are too stingy to buy formula. . . which brings us to our next topic. . .

UPDATE
The father brought his son over this afternoon to invite my son to play. It's the first time he's done that. I think he felt bad about yesterday.