The three year old has been going to daycare since September, so three months now. She had been home since she was born with my parents or an occasional sitter coming to watch her when I was working. Understandably, I was a little nervous about her starting daycare; she’d never really spent an extended amount of time in a classroom setting. How would she deal with other children? With teachers? With mandatory nap time?
Well, the first day, she walked right into the classroom, without nary a backward glance. A friend of mine, a former preschool teacher, said to me afterwards, “It means that she was ready to be out in the world.”
Of course, there have been a handful of teary drop-offs since then. Inexplicable mornings when she clings and cries and doesn’t want me to leave. Or at least they are mysterious to me. I’m sure she has her reasons for feeling vulnerable and clingy those mornings.
It is a little bit of an adjustments to go from being with a child all the time to only seeing her in the mornings and evenings. There is so much to her day that I don’t get to witness, so many lightbulb moments that I miss. She can now count and recognize shapes and letters. I certainly didn’t teach her that. But I’m grateful that someone else is.
Every day when she comes home from school, I give her a big hug, and I ask her, “How was your day today?” (I know such a vague open ended question is exactly the kind of thing parenting articles tell us not to ask, but it slips out before I can think of anything else.)
And every day she says with excited pride, “I didn’t cry at nap time!”
I don’t know what goes on at school that not crying at nap time is the highlight of her day, but it always makes me laugh when she says it.
At her parent teacher conference two weeks ago, I asked the teacher about this, wondering, “Does she usually cry at naptime?”
“Well,” they answered, “The first week, she did. She found naptime hard. But now she does really well at naptime.”
I thought about it in the days afterwards, and and, really… not crying at naptime – it actually seems like a pretty good barometer for how one’s day is going. When the things that used to be a struggle are almost mundane, it is easy for these previous challenges to fade into the mist and for our minds to adapt to a new, higher bar for a “good day”. Things like remembering to pay the bills on time, or making the bed in the morning morph into bigger tasks like estate planning and having the house spotless and it’s easy to feel daunted. Sometimes, though, it is good to remember when those low bars once seemed really high, and to celebrate one’s continued ability to hurdle them.
Here’s wishing you a wonderful (American) Thanksgiving week, where there is no crying at naptime.
This is so sweet and brings back lots of preschool memories with my kids; they also had naptime until a certain age and they LOVED it. Teachers would rub their back, music would be playing – I honestly wanted to show up and take a nap with them most days.
And this: “How was your day today?” – I ask that constantly and every time I think “this goes against every parenting article…” but it does often allow me to plumb deeper? If they say “it was okay” I can ask more pointed questions, often in a whimsical/fun way. So I continue to ask “How was your day today?” and the kids seem to survive…? Although maybe I’m secretly scarring them for life and they’ll spend weeks in therapy in their 20s talking about how hard it was to answer their Mom asking: “How was your day today?” Haha. Hope not!
I think you’re right that it’s more about listening and responding that the actual question itself.
I always tell myself if my kids end up scarred in therapy it will hopefully be about things bigger than I can solve for them. Hopefully.
Ha ha. I can see how this could become a catchphrase for me. How was your day? Well, I didn’t cry at naptime. That’s really sweet that she was measuring her own improvement and noticing it. That seems really emotionally mature to me!
yes! I think “I didn’t cry at naptime” is a pretty good bar for a lot of things!