What a relief!

Forget the school of hard knocks. For AJ, it's been the preschool of hard flushes.

In his first six weeks at preschool and the Cool Kids daycare program, AJ has been fairly positive and upbeat about his experiences there. He's not so wild about the hot lunches, but he likes his teachers and he loves that he no longer has to take a nap.

So it came as a bit of a surprise late last week when he suddenly announced he didn't like Cool Kids at all and didn't want to go back. He pleaded with us to just send him to preschool and then come pick him up.

Figuring that something must up, Mommy drew on her former reporter skills to question why the sudden change in attitude. No, he wasn't having problems with any of the other kids. Yes, he still liked all his teachers. No, he hadn't gotten in trouble for anything. By this point, tears were streaming down AJ's face as he sobbed that he just didn't want to go back. But still we pressed on until finally we got to the heart of the matter. More accurately, it was about his ears and his bladder.

The reason AJ no longer wanted to go to Cool Kids was because he didn't like going to the bathroom there. Why? Because the toilet was so loud when it flushed that it scared him.

Seriously.

It was so loud he thought a monster was coming to get him. A vivid imagination is not always a good thing.

With Daddy assuring him that no monsters were hiding in the bathroom, and Mommy promising to ask the teacher if there was a different bathroom he could use, we finally succeeded in calming him down. And so, Tuesday morning when I dropped him off, I spoke with the teachers and explained what AJ had told us. I said, "I don't know if there's anything you can do to accomodate this, but you should be aware..."

The teacher told me they'd been wondering if something was up because lately AJ would come tearing out of the bathroom when he was done. (It's just a single stall bathroom connected to the classroom.) She acknowledged that something was wrong with the toilet that made it so loud. And then she suggested the perfect solution for my very scared little boy.

"AJ," she said, "Just don't flush when you're done. Tell us, and we'll go in and flush it for you."

You should have seen the smile that spread across AJ's face. Such a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders! He nodded happily and ran off to play.

I'd hesitated whether to fight this battle for AJ. Obviously at some point he's going to have to toughen up, or he'll become the butt of jokes from his classmates. But at four years old, I think the far more important lesson is that he can talk to his parents about absolutely anything that's bothering him.

And it turns out I needn't have worried about his friends teasing him. His true friends were more than happy to come to his aid.

In the evening, I asked AJ if everything had gone all right at Cool Kids. Yes, he nodded.

"Did the teacher flush the toilet for you?" I asked.

"No," answered AJ. "I just told Gino and he flushed it for me."

To borrow from the late Charles Schultz: Happiness is... a best friend who will flush the scary toilet for you.