After months of anticipation, the day finally arrived! Astrid had let us know that she was even more excited about preschool than she was about Christmas. Now that is a big call!  She awoke early the day before her first day, bouncing with excitement for preschool eve.

This is apparently how excited she was………..

We managed to get through preschool eve without too many meltdowns. It had already been a big week with swimming and gymnastics starting back up, visits to the grandparents, market trips and just the general excitement of her new preschool adventure.

Astrid woke up on her first day pretty much bouncing off the walls with excitement……  it was hard to get her to calm down enough to eat breakfast.

Eventually we crammed enough sustenance into her, got dressed, fixed the mop of hair and took the obligatory first day photos.  Since getting her new school bag, lunch box and drink bottle for Christmas, they had been played with endlessly.  Finally it was time to wear the school bag for real.  No need to ask her to pose for the camera, Astrid was well ready to show off that school bag!

Do you think she might have been a little bit excited about her first day?  When asked how excited she was, the reply was ‘one thousand!!!’.  I’m not sure what scale that is measured on, but in 3 year old land that is a pretty enormous number so I’m going with damn excited………

Before too long it was time to head off down to the school.  Astrid was jumping out of her skin and ran pretty much the whole way down. We have never done that walk so fast!  We were worried about her being out of energy before she even arrived……

We arrived at preschool. Astrid looked excitedly at all the play equipment and the other kids. We signed her in and deposited all the different bits of food and drink in the appropriate containers (we had failed on correctly dividing up food containers already it seemed).  Then we headed inside to do some puzzles and get her settled in.

With 25 kids and even more parents and siblings it was pretty crowded.  Some kids looked decidedly worried but Astrid was keen to play and talk to the other kids. When it was time to pack up the morning activities she thought that might be it for the day and we were about to make her go home. Relieved that the parents were about to get out of the way so the real fun could start, we got a quick kiss goodbye (really she was only interested in saying goodbye to Soren!), and we were ushered out and off to the library for a morning tea with the other parents.  We left to the sounds of some kids crying but Astrid seemed fine so we weren’t at all worried.

After a quick visit to the library, Soren was looking pretty tired and we hadn’t yet got a phone call to tell us to come back and get our overly chatty three year old so we headed home and got Soren to bed.  The house was very quiet without Miss Astrid.  The time passed very quickly dealing with the cranky teething baby and we both thought it was strange that we had no idea what she was up to or how she was going. This was the first time she had been looked after by anyone other than a family member, so it was a weird experience.

Three o’clock rolled around before we knew it and I headed down to pick her up.  When I arrived there were lots of other nervous parents waiting by the doors to the classroom. We were told they’d had a wonderful and fun day and the little cherubs were released back into the wild one by one.  Astrid was one of the first out, looking very tired and a little grubbier than we left her, but happy to see me (although apparently the fact that her brother wasn’t there as he was having his afternoon nap at home with Dad was disappointing).

The walk back up the big hill was long and slow.  Astrid said she had heaps of fun but wasn’t forthcoming with details, and seemed somewhat zombie like with tiredness.  Once home and cuddles were doled out we surprised her with some afternoon tea of caramel popcorn and berry scones.    She wasn’t too tired to eat, and the sugar perked her up and all the details of the day were recounted.

The end of the day photo looks a little more tired and bedraggled than the start!!!

An exhausted but excited little girl went to bed that night. Ready to do it all again the next day!  Parents were almost as tired as Astrid……..