Greycinations: Preschool, The Second Time Around

I will never forget Greyson's first day of preschool. He cried for 45 minutes straight. I stood on the other side of his classroom door, listening with tears streaming down my cheeks. Coincidentally, that was also the same day I found out I was pregnant with Ella. Now here we are. Ella's first day of preschool is a week away. I find myself, as I was that day, just completely overrun by maternal hormones.

Greyson's school has a preschool, and that is where Ella Joy will be going. They will, in essence, be attending the same school. It is located in a building adjacent to his school, and the preschoolers share the school yard. She will attend three days a week from 8-4pm. It was an easy decision and the transition could not have been smoother. Since we are already a family at the school, the preschool director allowed us unlimited visits to ramp up to Ella starting in January. We'd go in the morning and stay till lunch. I would be with her the whole time. With every consecutive visit, I saw Ella increasingly getting more and more comfortable. She was getting the hang of the routine, and had started to get to know some of the other kids. She liked sitting with the kids for snack and lunch. She loved the myriad of fun activities and toys available, from the sand table, to the playground, to the bikes, to the books, to the puzzles. She even loved her uniform. The sea of faces so intimidating on our first visit, by our third, had morphed into a classroom of friends.

She is, for all intents and purposes, ready. My little girl cannot wait to be like her big brother in every way. I can see she loves the idea of school, I just don't know if she still will when she realizes that I'm not going to be there. My mind is a rampant with static anxiety. I am afraid my slow-to-warm-up daughter will get lost in the chaos. I'm afraid she won't eat lunch and no one will notice. I'm afraid she'll go No. 2 and no one will help her wipe. I'm afraid she'll be wondering why I've been away for so long. I know this is the point of school, for Ella to learn to be her own advocate. Every mother has to build up a strength to stand back and let her child find her way, scrapes and all. But I am finding that skin takes way too long to thicken. I thought it would be easier this time, and in some ways it is. I know now that our children need more than just us to thrive and grow. But it's also harder because I know this is the beginning of her discovery that this world is neither safe nor kind. That instinct to "scoop and shield" doesn't fade over time.

As excited as I am about this new chapter, I'm also grieving it. This is the end of the short time in her life that we get to be her whole world. After this, there will be others, some friends, nice and not-nice, influences both good and bad, incidences on the school yard and more frequent illnesses. I know this spells the end of all the mispronounced cute words she says like "lellow" and "aminal." It's just different once they leave the nest. She will grow up quicker now. As if I could ever have slowed her down.