Brycen's first day of 4 year old pre-school!

I know all parents get nervous and excited at the same time for their child's first day of school no matter how old they are. Of course, I am not exception...though I feel like we had a lot riding on these first few moments once we get to the school. When we visited last week, Brycen began crying when we pulled into the parking lot. I ended up having to carry him into the school and when I sat him down outside of his new room, he began screaming and running down the hall to the room he was in last year. He needed a lot of bribery (suckers & chips) to go into the room and sit/play while I filled out the registration paperwork.

It all seemed to turn around when we went to the store to get his new backpack that night. I'm not sure if holding onto a backpack made him remember how much fun school is, but since that day, he has once again been trying to imitate the word "school" when I say it and also smiles each time we talk about it.

He carried his backpack around all morning and wouldn't even put it down while I got him dressed in his new Thomas the Train shirt. He loves Thomas so much that it's a nice comfort for him to have a picture of him on his shirt to look at. He didn't even want to take his backpack off to sit in his carseat!!

Once we got to school, he started smiling and jabbering away and was so willing to walk in like a big boy. When I pointed to his name on his hook in the hallway, he smiled and began shrugging his backpack off. It's amazing that after 3 months of not doing this, he immediately remembered this is where his backpack goes! He walked into the room and immediately sat down on the floor where they had a bin of blocks. The only sad thing for me is that he completely ignored the other children in the room. 3 others were already there (out of the 14-15 for the entire room) and were all sitting at a table coloring, while Brycen immediately began making a train of the blocks on his own. The good news is he gave me a hug and kiss (with a little force on my part) and waved "bye" like it was no big deal. For once, I was not the parent with the child crying or running around!I had such mixed feelings walking out of the school with Aubree. I am looking forward to once again spending more time with her and being able to run errands without all the preparation and worrying about tantrums constantly, as well as for him to be around other children his age to learn social skills. On the other hand, I once again am having to relinquish my control of who he is around, the consistency of expectations, ensuring that he will receive ongoing encouragement of speech, how he is being approached, and protecting him for these several hours a day. When you have a child that needs so much monitoring and help in so many different areas, it's very hard to let others take control over that for 6 hours a day and then you worry about regression again and having to start over with all the progress we have made over the summer.

I'm sure each year will get easier with this and I have to remind myself this is only his second year of school, and the progress he makes each year will hopefully encourage me that relinquishing this control is benefiting him so much.