First Day of School update

When I picked Lily up from school this morning, the teacher said that Lily did “awesome!”  From what I had time to find out, sounds like she was fine shortly after I left, and had a good time playing, painting, and eating snack today.  Lily was happy to see me, and in a good mood when I picked her up.  She said she played on the slides and had goldfish and juice for snack, but I didn’t get much out of her after that because I had promised her we’d go get ice cream to celebrate her first day, and she was a little fixated on that.  The teacher had mentioned that Lily kept bringing that up at school today, and that is definitely Lily.  Once she gets something in her head, she talks about it pretty much non-stop until it happens.  Persistence is one of her strongest personality traits, and while this is mostly an awesome trait, it can also be a little repetitive when you have to hear the same thing 50-million times.  Oh well!  Just glad she was happy, and that she seemed to recover very quickly from being upset this morning.  Hooray!

First Day of School

Greetings, long-lost friends.  Excuse the absence, but I’m currently prepping to finally take the Psychology licensing exam and have been a bit busy these days.  The end is in sight, though (yay/eek!), as the test is scheduled for October 6th.  After I take that (and hopefully pass!) and then take the oral exam, I will finally be a licensed unemployed psychologist, and we can return to our irregularly scheduled blog programming.

In the meantime, I still had to take a few moments to document a rite of passage for all children…the first day of school!  Now granted, Lily’s school meets for 3 hours, one day per week, so we’re not exactly moving away to Harvard yet, but it’s still a big deal in our world.  Lily started “K2” at Immanuel Lutheran School (yes, we’re Catholic-ish, but no worries), which is just down the road from our house.  For the record books, her teacher is Mrs. Joanna Kelly, and the aide is Mrs. Rachel Jason.

Lily met Mrs. Kelly on Tuesday, and was very wary of the whole school experience at first, because she seemed to think I was going to drop her off during our “meet the teacher” session.  Once she realized that I was staying, she was glad to check out the toys and puzzles, and seemed very interested in coming back for more playtime and to check out the playground Mrs. Kelly showed her a picture of. 

Fast forward to yesterday, when we’re talking about school, and Lily suddenly realizes that Mommy doesn’t get to stay with her when it’s actually time for the first day of school.  Poor thing started to get a bit weepy, and kept asking if I could please go with her.  Breaks my little mommy heart, but I just had to reassure her and play up the positives.

This morning, we got up early.  Y’all, I’m talking 8:00 early.  But we did it, and managed to keep Lily upbeat enough to snap some cute photos before school.  Unfortunately, the porch was a bit shady, and I wasn’t paying enough attention to my shutter speed, so some of them are blurry.  Sorry about that.  But here you go:

Check out those glorious locks below!  We have made some hair-growing progress in our absence.  Not ready for a pony-tail yet, but we’re almost ready for a hairbow, at least!

Would you have expected anything different for Lily’s backpack?  Pink with a cat.  Doesn’t get much more “Lily” than that.  Her shirt reflects her secondary loves…blue and mermaids!

As excited as she was for picture-taking, you can probably guess that the actual drop-off experience wasn’t as joyous.  Lily started to get teary in the car as I was getting her out, and kept asking me to go with her.  As we walked into the school, she started crying, and was REALLY crying by the time I walked her into her room.  As planned, I gave her a goodbye hug and kiss, and immediately ran out the door so as not to prolong the misery of her begging me to stay, and dashed out to the parking lot to commiserate (and maybe get a bit weepy myself) with another mommy friend of mine whose child, Landon, is in Lily’s class.  Michael also showed up to see how things had gone, and we had been chatting for only a couple of minutes before the teacher came out and yelled to me that Lily was no longer crying and was just fine. 

Hooray!

I’m going to go pick her up in a little while, and I look forward to hearing how her day went.  I will update you later, but wanted to get this posted while I had a few moments to myself.  I miss blogging and sharing Lily with everyone, and hope that I can get back on track shortly after my exam.