I can only imagine what it will be like one day, 13 years from now, when my oldest flies the coop.

I'm having a hard enough time dealing with the end of his preschool career.

Lest you paint me as a melodrama mama, allow me to explain: He was 20 months old when he first stepped into the Rising Stars class, just him and five other toddlers.

Day after day, he insisted on wearing Mardi Gras beads, sometimes more than one strand. He called helicopters "hebbalockers." I was worried he'd bite one of his classmates. He didn't.

On his first day, he had his maiden encounter with a doughnut. It was a crumb-encrusted Entenmann orb that was on hand in a box in the library to console teary moms as they waited for potentially teary kids with a diagnosis of separation anxiety. He thought they were bagels, which made me laugh. There's a big difference between a bagel and a doughnut. Just like there is between preschool and kindergarten. Preschool is for babes. Kindergarten is for little kids who turn into big kids as they advance from grade to grade.

Incidentally, he never shed a single tear.

Not so for me.

I've been dreading this moment since winter vacation. I mourn leaving an environment in which every teacher - there are only eight of them - knows Aviv and, more importantly, loves him.

Do elementary teachers love their grade-school students as much? How can they with so many students to tend to? My son is leaving a preschool of less than 50 kids for an elementary school with more than 800. How can those teachers remember all their students' names, let alone fall in love with them?

This year, the preschool entered the techno-age and debuted a wiki. On it, my son's teacher wrote a tearjerker end-of-the-year post about how the kids have evolved. "They have learned and matured in ways no one could have predicted and when you look at them now you can get a glimpse of the men and women they will become."

Pass the tissues.

Because the Jewish Community Preschool of Wake County is the kind of place where teachers bestow kindness rocks on kids for doing nice things for their friends, non-Jewish parents send their kids there too.

On the playground and in the four classrooms, the mantra is "You can't say you can't play." So there are no cliques, no "popular" crowd. Everyone plays with everyone else.

In the real world, of course, that doesn't happen. And the real world begins with elementary school.

I originally signed my son up for preschool, truth be told, because a friend with a daughter my son's age was doing it.

She did the research. We just tagged along.

It was a haphazard decision made only a couple weeks before the school year started. When I called the director to inquire, I had a reporter's list of questions. Top of the list: What kind of things do they learn?

With consummate diplomacy, she informed me this was no academic preschool.

They would not sit at tables and practice their letter strokes. They would not learn to count to 100. They would play. And when they got bored, they would play something else.

Weird, I thought.

Four years later, I no longer think that.

Despite the lack of formal instruction, perhaps because of it, Aviv has learned his letters and his numbers, how to read and how to add and subtract a pile of chocolate chips.

More importantly, he's learned how to be a good friend.

His preschool teachers know his likes and dislikes, they know his sister, they know his baby sister. They cobble him together a lunch if we forget (twice in the course of four years) and advocate for him when needed.

Last month, they helped him write a letter I discovered when I unpacked his lunchbox at the end of the school day: "Please don't send me my leftover dinner for lunch."

They reapply sunscreen. They empower him with the knowledge that four-year-olds can wipe their own behinds. They teach him to carry his own lunchbox and his own backpack instead of relying on his mom to do it.

They teach confidence and creativity, music and journaling, all things that I do at home as well.

But they do it exclusively.

I do it while juggling work and breakfastsnacklunchsnackdinnerdessert, laundry, the leaky toilet, the grocery shopping.

I was a preschool drop-out. I still remember the day my teacher came by our home with a pink iced heart cookie to lure me back. I took the cookie but rejected the overture.

I'm so glad my son didn't follow in my footsteps in that regard.

Bonnie appears every Monday on TriangleMom2Mom.