Froggy’s preschool adventures

I just dropped Froggy (my daughter) off at her new preschool.  Today is day #2 there.  She was a little upset today, but not crying.  Yesterday the drop-off was a huge success with no tears and no “Mommy, stay!”  When I picked her up yesterday she was bubbling over with excitement.  She had to show me a picture of Tinkerbell she thoughtfully colored black and green.  She had to tell me about “Little Gym” and how they danced, and how she got rained on outside, and she ate all her lunch and she slept at naptime.  I know she had a great day, and I know that today will be great too.  But there is always that part of me that feels really guilty dropping her off at school while I go to work, and it gets amplified when she doesn’t want me to leave.  But, notice, she doesn’t want me to take her away with me, she wants me to STAY.  The kid likes school.

This is Froggy’s third “daycare” situation since January.  If it was a perfect world we would have picked the right place from the start.  But, we didn’t.  Back at christmas time I was interviewing for jobs, and I had two really great prospects.  We had just relocated for my husband, so we were totally new to the area and had to start looking for daycares.  Originally we planned on one near our house, in the city.  We looked at a few there, and were all set to start at one when I got a job.  The school was nice enough, but my job turned out to be about 30 minutes out of the city, with hours of 8:30 to 5:30.  I couldn’t make it to pick Froggy up by 6.  So, my husband was picking her up; not a problem in general, but he’s got to go do field work for 3 weeks in the fall, and our situation has to be doable without Daddy.  Froggy liked that school, but not enough.  She would whine in the morning when I dropped her off and it was usually a little bit of a struggle (hello guilt!).  So, we started looking for a place closer to my job.

We found an agency that manages in-home daycares, and through them we found a great “nanny” – a woman with one 4-year-old boy who was looking to care for just one other child around Froggy’s age.  I liked her so much that I didn’t interview anyone else at the time.  And we thought that Froggy may do better in a home environment than in a school (at that point she was just 2.5 years old).   So she went to the nanny’s house for about 2 months.  We would have kept her there but the nanny’s husband got transferred and they were forced to move, very quickly in fact.  We had to find another place.

Our nanny told us that Froggy was definitely ready for a school environment.  She would take her to her son’s preschool when they were dropping him off and Froggy wouldn’t want to leave!  She grew a little less introverted and started liking to play with other kids a little bit.  So, when the nanny told me they had to leave, I started looking for a school again.  And I found one that is really close to my workplace and also one of the best preschools in the area.  Luckily, they had an opening for her age group!  I visited, and then I took Froggy to visit, and then her nanny took her there for a few minutes each day during their last week together.  Like I said, she started there yesterday with no tears!  It is a great environment and I’m so glad we found it.

I feel bad that Froggy’s had to go through so much change in the last 6 months.  But she is amazingly resilient.  When she’s in the right place, she’ll be just fine.  And she’s going to learn so much and make friends.