Big Work, Big Boy

I love Henry's ambition.  He hangs out with the 5 year-olds in his class, and especially admires a 5 year-old girl named Chloe (earlier this fall: "There are too many friends at school.  There should only be two friends, Henry and Chloe.").  And he's always asking to do the "big work" that the kindergartners get to do.  The teachers' reply is that "the work isn't ready for him," but I get the impression that he pesters them regularly about it.  Sometimes he gets to do it anyway.  One thing the older kids do is match words with pictures, and then write the word in their composition books.  Henry can do the matching (I think because he copies the one the teacher does, doing it by eye rather than reading it), but of course he can't write.  As he put it himself, "I can't even write yet!"  But yesterday he was telling me how he wasn't able to do the words work that his friends were doing, but he did the objects matching.  I asked him, playfully, "Did you write the words in your composition book?" and he got kind of mad.  

He also has high standards for himself.  This week he brought home a paper with a picture of 5 fish on it and the numeral 5 printed several times.  The first one was traced perfectly with purple ink, the others traced very well with gray ink.  I was so amazed and impressed when he told me that he wrote those 5's!  (I'm still not sure that he really did it, but he says he did and he's usually right.)  Great job, I said!  "No, I didn't do it very well; look, it's not as good as Eileen's (the teacher)."  

But he's still working out whether he's a big boy or not.  He's still pooping and peeing regularly in his pull-ups, and sometimes he's not even really trying to get to the potty.  So we're at a bit of a stalemate, there.  This morning, he was playing and I heard him say quietly, "I'm not a big boy, yet."  (He had pooped in his pull-up.)