Over the weekend we took a walk down to the mall through the snow to pick up some Christmas packages. It was the first day of snow, and it was an exciting walk. We looked for animal tracks in the snow and we crunched it – all two or three inches of the stuff. We walked through the forest and through the neighborhoods where we used to walk way back in the spring, when my daughter first started walking to preschool.
We walked by the preschool that we devoted so much time to over the last two years. It is a parent participation preschool, which means that parents volunteer in the classroom regularly and every parent has a job at the school. Last year I was president of the preschool, which means that I spent an extraordinary amount of time in board meetings and overseeing a renovation of the school.
We walked past the school. The trees we donated when my daughter “graduated” in June are leafless now, but they’ll provide some shade for the children in the spring. One of them is an apple tree, and in a few years, if the school is lucky, it might produce some apples for the children to pick. But it won’t be my child. As we walked by the school, I realized that we are finished with our preschool experience. The school is renovated, time moves on, and a new class of three-year-olds has almost finished three months at the school. We loved it, but it’s done now.
Now we’re on to kindergarten. This is an adventure in itself, an adventure in home learning and free learning and forest and farm learning. Next year will bring another adventure, likely a visit to a formal school.
The baby I had has grown rapidly into a toddler, then a preschooler, now an elementary-school-aged child. She lost her first tooth over the weekend, a victim to an early candy cane. She counts from one to nineteen and tells me that is when she will be an adult, and I am sure that it won’t be long before she’s in high school and finished high school and off somewhere else in the world.
The preschool years can seem hard, with their epic tantrums and the attachment needs of children who aren’t quite ready to leave their parents. They can seem hard, with the food fussies and the forgetting how to go to sleep. But like every year of your child’s life, the days are long and the years are very short. Enjoy them.