The news about Gagarin's flight were everywhere. The next day we talked about it in the obdanište at breakfast - at other times we were busy with whatever the upbringers (literal translation of vaspitačica) had planned, or just horsing around. I don't really remember how much I understood, but it did involve the Earth being a ball and there being an orbit around it. Some even remembered Lajka from before - or remembered that the adults mentioned it.
I was changing teeth at the time, and my lower right #1 was a couple of millimeters taller than the rest. Once during horseplay, we were in a big tangle of perhaps six or eight kids, and I landed my jaw on someone's knee. The ace tooth just broke, lost its tip. Became more chisel like. Later in the day my parents noticed my different looks, and took me to a dentist a couple of days later. The dentist smeared some protective liquid over the cut and recommended a gold cap. I didn't like the idea - actually the tooth worked perfectly as it was. It was sharp, first a bit sensitive to temperature but that went away soon. We did get that 1g of gold a few years later, I remember we went to someone's place where they had this kind of ancient polished veneer furniture. The gold was never applied - we just forgot about it and I guess this little plaque was eventually lost, when everybody forgot where we put it. I stayed with this chipped tooth and never even thought of fixing it. It just works.
I guess rememebering this, and so clearly, means that I was in obdanište for two years before elementary school. It kind of fits with this - I remember that there was some weird feeling when kids of our age came to the regular zabavište (zabava - entertainment; zabavište is the one pre-school year) while we in the daycare were kept separate from them, doing different things at different times. They'd leave around noon, while we stayed until our parents came from work. We didn't mingle with them much.
Now (april 2024) I remembered another detail... the toilet seats then were made so that the shit would fall onto an almost flat surface, sort of shallow pan, which stood above the syphon, and everything would fall from it into the front vertical pipe. Therefore it was not unusual that it splashed and wet the butt. The other reason this was bad design was that when someone dumps a copious amount of crap, the jet of water wouldn't be strong enough to carry it all away. And the obdanište had the smaller model, about two thirds of adult ones, so the ass was inasmuch closer to water. Many times I'd just bite the bullet and hold it until I got home, and this was the reason. Outhouse was better than this.
That model was soon (just a few years later) replaced with another, much like the today's, where the receiving surface is sloped and most of it slidess into the water right away, and the splash practically never happened, maybe one drop sometimes. The „replaced“ means they stopped producing that and switched to the new, but the already installed ones stayed for as long as they lasted. I kept seeing them in all the places where they were among the first who had running water in the house - aunts in Belgrade, various offices, schools etc. Actually, for all my years of education, I never shat at school, and I guess this was what got me the habit. The other reason was that they frequently had no toilet paper.