First day of school

Today was Sophia's first day of preschool. A little strange starting in March, I know. We toured many schools and this one had an opening in the 3 year old class, so the director suggested she start now. Since I had to almost physically drag Sophia out of every school we toured, I thought maybe it was a good idea. Plus, it will help me decide if this is the school for her to attend next year, and if so, she will know some of the kids already.

The day went very well. She didn't mind, or even seem to notice, that I left. Tessa and I came home and she immediately took a nap, from which I had to wake her when it was time to pick Sophia up. It is funny that I was imagining having time to spend with Tessa, but she will apparently be sleeping the time away, at least for now. Not that I am complaining about having almost 2 hours to myself.

Pick-up was not quite as smooth. For me, anyway. The base was locked down (I found out later that it happens whenever an alarm goes off in a building somewhere on base) and I could not leave! I was hoping to be about 10 minutes early, but after waiting almost 20 minutes at the gate, I was almost 10 minutes late! Several of my readers already know this, as I was frantically calling everyone I could think of that might be near a computer to get the school's number. It is now stored in my cell phone, as it should have been previously!

Sophia, of course, couldn't have cared less. I was imagining her sitting alone at the school, with the teacher, wondering why all the other children's Mommies had picked them up but she was still there and had no Mommy to pick her up. But many kids stay later and have lunch at school, so she didn't even realize that I was late.

She gave me a giant hug when I arrived and immediately started telling me about how she drew lots of pictures with stencils, cracked open raw (really, they were RAW!) peanuts and then grinded them up to make peanut butter, and then got to eat peanut butter on crackers, and it was really delicious, and isn't that cool?! The teacher told me she did great, fit right in, and listened well. Her only problem is that she scratched a boy and neither of them would tell the teacher why it happened. Sophia told me later that several other kids were scratching him (so that somehow makes it ok?!) But I felt it made a good lesson about how we should help other kids when someone is being mean to them and ask the kids to stop, or find a teacher to help, and certainly never join the mean kids. Hopefully it will be remembered.

We celebrated her first day of school (minus the scratching incident) by having her Dad meet us there and we went out for lunch, then to ToysRUs to pick out a special toy. She chose dinosaurs.

Now I just have to find a way to explain to her that this week is parent-teacher conferences and she can't go back until next week!