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School Days and Preschool Days, Too:
A treasury of anecdotes culled from my work and play as a preschool worker and an elementary school after- school activities supervisor
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THE BINKY QUESTION  

              I created the "specialized binkies" above for a humorous preschool Circle on the subject.      

     My brother had a grade school friend named "Binky Stanza". The word never meant anything to me, though, until I heard one of our preschool teachers asking a child at nap time, "Do you have your binky?"
     What's a binky, I wondered? Before long a process of elimination showed me that a binky had to be what I'd previously known as a pacifier.
      I fell in love with the word "binky". It's a fun word to use. Many of our two year-olds are attached to binkies, others to blankets, and others perpetually "eat their shirt". At nap time, binkies await in childrens' bedding, lovingly placed in a prominent place on the pillow.

     Around the time I discovered the "b-word", I happened to buy a necklace in a little import shop. Made in Peru, the piece was round with a hole in the center, and was painted with a different design on each side.
     The necklace is about the same size as a pacifier, and one day, trying to amuse a table of preschoolers at my lunch table, I referred to it as "my binky". The children looked very perplexed. One girl raised her hand and asked the head teacher, a couple of tables away, "Ms. Meg, is Mr. Max a baby?" I don't think Ms. Meg had been privy to our prior conversation, but she solemnly assured all the children that we don't have any babies teaching at our school.

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