preschool

while i knew that miss kayley would not be ours forever, my heart did not want think about sending my baby out into the world....alone. she's still so little. or even think about elsie and kayley not spending days together because they love each other very much and have so much fun together. so i've spent the last several months enjoying our arrangement - kayley and elsie love each other and 'some day' elsie will go to preschool, but let's not think about that now. of course now kayley has been presented with a good opportunity. the very real chance that we will be losing her to a very fortunate bunch of children at a school in sammamish, forced my head into the conversation. time to find a school. and quickly. this will be good for her, it's time she started!

now i am very fortunate to have a group of girlfriends that i've known for many years, some since kindergarten, no joke. three of them are educators and one of those three owns her own preschool. the other two teach at that preschool. (www.thediscoverypreschool.com) perfect, elsie will go there. i know them, they know elsie, they are moms, what's not to love? she has to be three......not three pretty soon, but three. so she can't enroll there until next fall. hmmm, no good. after some long discussion with one of those teacher-friends, montessori sounded like a good fit for preschool.

the search begins. and let me tell you, there are a lot of preschools these days. some have infant programs, some require that she be potty trained, some are montessori and some are of completely different philosophies that i haven't spent the time learning about. all i can say is we found our school.

moments before our scheduled visit, i said to kayley, "i want it to be like my wedding gown, i just knew when i put it on that i would be getting married in it." (yes, the second time around anyway, thank you very much, as that experience escaped me the first time.) anyway, we then walked into lakeside montessori, pine lake campus, and met with a wonderful woman who gave us a lovely tour. the classrooms are beautiful, the people are friendly, warm, and calm. the outside play area puts to shame any park elsie has ever seen. it just feels right. to confirm it all, charles, kayley and i watched as miss elsie quickly made herself at home talking to the teachers, exploring the classrooms, and even walking up to the kids having lunch at their tables, begging to be invited into the group. now our girl is usually kind of shy in new situations, takes her a while to warm up and all that. but she was immediately more confident in this place more quickly than in any other situation we've seen. it's a sign.

the best way i came up with to describe what i was feeling is this: lakeside feels like a school, the other places we visited felt like daycares.

i am going there tomorrow morning with all of the completed paperwork to enroll her for real. i'm very excited. but the most exciting part is that the cute little pink butterfly lunchbox I ordered will be delivered to us on thursday....complete with her name embroidered on the front. now i'm just excited and no longer emotional. i know, that comes back on her first day.

www.lakesidemontessori.com (she'll be at the pine lake campus).