First days

The kids had their first day back at daycare yesterday.

Picking up Captain Adventure was one of those delicious agonies, where you feel so good and so bad at the same time you almost can’t bear it. When he saw me standing at the door, he rushed over as fast as his little legs could carry him and flung himself against my legs. As I picked him up, he wrapped his entire body around me and was laughing and crying so hard he was almost hysterical. He smeared my entire face with slimy but enthusiastic toddler-kisses, wrapped his fists in my hair, and crushed himself against me like he thought he could just melt into me and never risk being left again!

I felt like an evil villain for leaving him in the first place, and like a kind of goddess to have been so missed. And evil again, for enjoying that he missed me. And all-over fuzzy because…I missed him too! It felt so good to have my little baby boy back in my arms again after six whole hours!

{rolls eyes at own melodrama}

But still. It was the Very First Time he’s ever been left somewhere. He’s had a babysitter for a few hours, he’s even been left with his grandma for five whole days – but here in our house. Not Elsewhere. And definitely not with strangers, for cripes’ sake! (Even though those ‘strangers’ are the same women who tended his big sisters for us and are pretty close to ‘family’ for our Den.)

The girls, on the other hand…Eldest and Danger Mouse didn’t want to leave and informed us, coolly, that they were scheduled to have snack at 6:00 and could we please go away and return at, say, 6:15 or so? And Boo Bug looked up indifferently, took her fingers out of her mouth and said, “I’m listening to storytime, go get coffee right now and come back later!”

Well. Glad to have been missed so desperately.

This morning, Captain Adventure gave me a little initial howling about being back at that Evil Place – but we took it slow and he got involved in the playing and the snack and so forth and hardly even blinked when I waved at him through the door. When I peeked back in a few minutes later, he was still playing with the bead maze and smiling.

Like having had seventeen months – SEVENTEEN MONTHS! – at home with him, these next couple weeks are likewise a blessing. To have the time, every morning, to go as slowly as needed to make him feel secure, to not have a train to catch or a client to meet or irons in the fire.

It’s a good thing.