November Thankful #7

In honor of Thanksgiving, I'm doing daily thankful posts. I'd love it if you'd join me by commenting here or on MichiGal's Facebook page.

November 7

Today I am thankful for half-day kindergarten. It's now two months into the school year, and I still don't think Lucy is ready to take the plunge into full-day territory. She is tired and irritable, even though I have pushed back her bedtime as early as I can without majorly interfering with activities and dinner. I am glad, really glad that her school offers the option of letting kindergarteners stay half-day. There are only three of us half-day holdouts (spread among four kindergarten classes), and the situation is not ideal because she misses out on a lot of fun stuff her classmates get to do. But I would truly feel like I was doing Lucy a huge disservice to force her to stay all day. The first few weeks of school, when so many kids were crying every morning at drop-off, I felt bad for the rest of them for having to stick it out until 3:24. I know kids are resilient and they adjust to just about anything, but Lucy is still adjusting to going to school every day so I think we'll give her some more time before we make the switch.

In the meantime, she loves coming home and having lunch with Mathilda. Many days we play school (we've had to expand to playing boarding school because she never wants the game to end) and I give her little homework assignments to do. She plays and rests comfortably on the couch instead of on a towel on the floor. Maybe some people think I'm just babying her or hindering her, but she's as happy to be a half-day kindergartener as I am happy to have her home with me every afternoon. She has a lot of time to grow up, I'm in no hurry.