"School" Days 1-2

Clara has always been very fun and engaging at home, but very shy around strangers. When we take her in public, she's clingy and doesn't smile much. That's a lot of the reason we wanted to put her in this M-Th morning preschool this fall before she starts full-time daycare sometime in late winter or spring. It seemed a slow transition to dealing with the outside world might be especially good for her.

Imagine our surprise on Day 1 when Scott pulled up in the drop-off line, and Clara let a stranger get her out of the car without incident. Imagine our shock when he picked her up later that morning and she hadn't cried at all, and was described by her "teachers" as "happy and ate a lot of snacks."


walking out to dada's car after day 1
(holding a stranger's hand like nothing is amiss)


Day 2 she was described as "very happy" (and again "ate a lot of snacks") and -- get this -- she reportedly was trying to talk to and interact with the other kids. Clara??  They want to move her to the 2 year old room, where she'll be the youngest by a couple of months. (Currently she's in the 1 year old room, where she is older than most of the kids, though not the oldest.)

I'm a pessimist and Scott is an optimist, but this has gone better than either of us ever imagined. The only backlash is that she's been tired and cranky in the evenings. We're going to put her to bed earlier and see if that helps.

we celebrated a successful day 1 with a trip to the park,
where she proceeded to go down The Big Twisty Slide all by herself

Did you hear something???   (Oh, that was just my sigh of relief heard around the world!)