For at least a year, we’ve been talking with little EC about school. Primarily because she has spent all her life with us, and never has gone to daycare or really spent any amount of time in a non-family situation, she has always expressed anxiety about leaving us. When we’ve taken her to Sunday school a few times, she always put up a fight the first week or two that we were there, and we never stayed in one place long enough for her to go to the same Sunday school more than three or four times. So the idea of spending 4–5 hours in school without us was completely foreign to her. But we’ve talked about it, in language that made it a “when” not an “if”, and praised the virtues of the fun and games and playgrounds that would be at her disposal. I think our cause was aided by the coronavirus, because she’s been even more than usual without friends her own age to play with for half a year.
At any rate, the day came—Wednesday the 2nd—and we walked her to the door of her classroom…or, rather, the large community space below the church where Pre-K4 has been established for the year to have a chance at keeping some social distance among 11 preschoolers. Wearing her unicorn-themed mask (which of course she picked off the rack at Target) she coerced the teachers into closing their eyes and holding out their hands to receive the presents that she was bringing them (she wanted to take them her favorite stuffed animals…I steered her toward some Lindt chocolate bars), and then marched right to the classroom door before turning and yelling, “Bye Daddy and Mommy!” Seeing that she had such confidence, we walked away before there was any chance for second thoughts on her part. I glimpsed her through the window as we left, though, and she was standing still at the doorway looking out…maybe looking for us.
Fast forward four hours, and when I picked her up and asked her how school was, she said “very good!”. Then she went on to describe how she got to play with a “potato person”, and try the monkey bars (but fell off the first bar) and play castle on the playground with a new friend, and eat her snacks…enthusiasm bubbling from every pore. We took her a second day and she happily stood outside with the teachers waiting for other classmates to show up while I left, and when I picked her up she had a card that she had drawn for me with markers of her and me doing “our favorite things” together. Hiking, flying on a plane to New Mexico, and two others that I was supposed to caption.
That was Thursday. She was disappointed to hear that she wasn’t going back on Friday, or Saturday or Sunday or Monday. And tonight during dinner she said that she wants to go to school all day, until dinner time. I’m torn between being ecstatic that she loves school so much, and wondering if she’s actually that bored with me! At any rate, I’ll take it.
Maybe it would be safer too. Because on her day off today, I took her out to ride her bike, and after a virtuoso performance riding circles around campus, she went out for one more lap and did a faceplant on the concrete halfway through. So when spending the day with me involves a swollen, bloody lip and a scratched-up nose…maybe school all day isn’t such a bad idea after all!