Endings and Beginnings

So, I have this whole post about cheese, Cheeseland and Cheesehead ready to go except that I stopped to find a picture of cheese and never got back to it. I thought it would be appropriate for my first post on this blog considering the name but it will have to wait. I have a major life event going on in my household right now.

As of today, my daughter is done with daycare. We have had the good fortune of being able to keep our daughter in the same daycare she started at when she was 8 weeks old. This has not been without its ups and downs. God knows there were times I wanted to yank her out of there as quickly as I could but I stuck with it because she loved it there and that's where her friends are.

So, because of this, she has been dreading today. She would get upset and cry about it last month. To help her through the last day, I told her we would have a pool party the day after she was done but the weather isn't cooperating and it's only going to be a high of 74 tomorrow which is not nearly warm enough to go swimming. I needed another plan.

Last night, she and I went to the dollar store and bought a bunch of party favors, some brown paper lunch bags, and some stickers. She decorated the lunch bags with the stickers and I filled them with those odd little toys the kids get at parties and some candies ... Tootsie Rolls, Tootsie Roll Pops, and the best, all-sugar candy of all time Pixie Sticks. I threw in a pencil and pencil sharpener for good measure. We also picked up a cake for the class. This way, hopefully, she will learn that the ending of something is not necessarily the end of everything and should be celebrated as an opportunity for a beginning. She won't get the concept of it at Age 5 but hopefully the idea will sink in a little bit.

Her crying about leaving daycare has kind of tapered off this month which may be due, in part, to the building excitement about the next step in her education ... KINDERGARTEN. We go to Kindergarten Orientation on Tuesday for an hour and her first full day of kindergarten will be Thursday. She'll be going to school with two of her cousins and this helps ease some of the anxiety about changing schools. We've been picking up her uniform pieces for her move into big kiddom and she's thrilled that she will be able to wear dresses most of the time. I have told her that as long as her uniform doesn't get stained, I will let her wear it as much as possible. If the two jumpers I've bought get stained, she will need to wear pants. Hopefully that will cause her to be a bit more careful.

My hubby just emailed and said he got a little choked up when the kid said goodbye to the teacher that sits by the front door in the morning to collect the children from the parents as they rush to their jobs. Marina was the first teacher we saw the first day we brought the kid to daycare. (The picture is from the end of our first day at daycare and back at work.) She followed us into the Infant Room and told us that she would take the baby. She looked like any other parent that might be walking into the daycare. She wasn't the teacher we'd been told would be taking the baby from us and I had never met her before. I looked at her and said "I'm sure you can but, unfortunately, I don't know who you are and I'm not just handing over my child to you. I'm sure you understand." Things have changed since then (there are only 3 of the staff there now that were there when the kid first arrived) and she is a very trusted adult. She has to be to take responsibility for our child, right?

I'm so glad that hubby takes the kid to daycare. I would have been crying when the kid said goodbye to Marina. My baby isn't a baby anymore ... :(