Preschool Postcards

This week, finally, Sania has begun to settle into her new school. My fingers remain crossed, but I believe we may have turned a corner. Sania has been a total disaster at drop off all but one day since starting this new school on 1/5. That is, on the days she's been there.

In the 5 weeks, she has attended school sporadically at best, besieged by illness, holidays and all-manner of disruptions. I think today marks her first five-day week at school.

So the drop-offs are agonizing affairs, up to now, with wailing, bawling, high-pitched screeching, nose-running tirades, coat-gripping, air-gasping and general mayhem. Leading up to the actual drop-off, every obstacle is posed from fatigue and nausea to starvation, illness and the possibility it may rain.

We kept on powering through (we went through same with Reid) but it didn't seem to get better. We knew it was supposed to get better, and helpful people would helpfully note it would get better, but it wasn't getting better.

So we decided to change the game. The typical approach is to make it seem like a normal, natural separation, which will pave the way for it becoming a normal, natural separation. That wasn't working. So this week, I decided against my own better judgment to ease into the drop-off, engaging Sania in a little show and tell in the classroom, to get her comfortable in there. Of course, she's comfortable there all day, even on her worst drop-off days, according to all involved. She does fine, they say, and she surely is fine after a few minutes. I've lingered on the side of the one-way glass long enough to determine she would be fine.

So it's not, actually, to get her comfortable in the classroom, but rather just to get her engaged with that stuff and disengaged with her previously-established viewpoint that she should not be here. Therefore, I have her show me some work, I find some stuff in her cubbie that I think is wonderful and I ask her to autograph it for me (she has no idea what this means) and she dutifully writes a lower-case "l" (the only letter she knows how to write) and says, "it's an el," to which I respond "for Sania LEIGH." Then I slowly ease out of the room after telling her I love her, as she puts her pen away, and I let her know I have to take these valuable pieces of now-authenticated with her signature art to my office and hang them on my wall.

And that's how she stopped crying.