The first week of school is officially over, which means that the back-to-school clothes that were bought last month have been affectionately (lol jk) tossed into the laundry basket, most kids know who their teachers are going to be for the duration of the year, and 98% of people who are — or regularly come into contact with — a child between the ages of 3 and 18 years old are sick with a back-to-school virus. Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.
William had his first week of preschool, and I assumed that it would be, for the most part, a pretty smooth transition; he’s been in daycare part-time from the time he was 10 months old (one day a week) until Isla was born the month before he turned three (at which point he was at daycare for three days full-time and two days for just an hour or so). APPARENTLY a nine-month hiatus from daycare was more invaluable in this particular circumstance than the 2+ years he was actually in daycare.
So basically, preschool drop-off went like this:
ME: “William, aren’t you excited?! Preschool is going to be SO FUN!”
W: “NO it is NOT fun. I don’t want to go, I want to STAY HOME!”
And then William screamed and cried and begged me to stay with his big puppy dog eyes; it broke my heart! I decided to bribe him with his favourite meal (the Happy variety from “Two McDoubles” aka McDonald’s) for after preschool; that kind of worked! He ended up crying for about 10 minutes on-and-off at the beginning of the class, and then towards the end was asking for me again, but his teacher told him that there was only five minutes until the end, so he was satisfied with that response.
I figured that since he ended up *mostly* being OK on the first day, the second day would be easier… right? AGAIN, I WAS NOT RIGHT AT ALL.
Day two was even worse! He threw himself on the ground (you know when kids do that like jelly-arm thing and go limp so you can’t even pick them up? yeah, he did that), and also at one point just waltzed himself to the front door of his school (erm, yeah, no, you can’t just LEAVE), and after much coaxing and gentle persuasion (including bribing him AGAIN with a treat after school, which did zilch, I might add), I finally just had to hand him off to his teacher. Thankfully, the tears only lasted about five minutes this time, and he was totally fine afterwards! I felt so awful that he was crying! I really, really want him to love preschool; he definitely needs to socialize with kids his own age, because, frankly, he’s way too good at adult conversation.
Hopefully the more time he spends playing with new friends, the more he’ll learn to love it! Alternatively, I’ll be buying a LOT of McDonald’s Happy Meals and Starbucks’ cake pops this year.
Also: he’s still not excited about this upcoming week of school. Bribery suggestions in the form of anything but food are more than welcome!
How did your first week of school go? Hopefully better than ours! Let me know in the comments!
xo
PS: you can find the First Day of School printables I made/used for William’s first day here!
rhiannon-mairi 