Our previous baby-sitter, Nicole, emailed me over the weekend to ask if Catie could come play in the morning one day this week. Catie was good friends with Nicole’s daughter Kiersten, and I know they’ve missed each other these past couple of months, so I thought sure, why not. We decided that Catie could go play on Wednesday morning, since that worked for both Nicole’s and my schedules.
On Tuesday, when I picked Catie up from daycare, the director stopped me and asked if I had five minutes to talk. I said ok, and my stomach immediately knotted up. Why is that? It was like some residual “getting called into the principal’s office” fear that came out of nowhere. The woman is only a few years older than me. Why am I intimidated? Bizarre.
She wanted to know what I thought about moving Catie up to the preschool class. The class Catie’s in now is called the “Upper Twos,” which means it’s kids that range from 2 1/2 years old to kids that just recently turned 3. The preschool class is all 3 year-olds. I thought that being fully potty-trained was a prerequisite for the preschool class, but the director said no, there are a few kids in that room who are still in Pull-Ups. (For the record, Catie has probably a 90-95% success rate with peeing in the potty. It’s just the poop. I cannot get her to poop in the potty to save my freaking life.) The main difference between the rooms is the curriculum. She had noticed that Catie knows all of her letters and the sounds they make (which I take absolutely no credit for, it was totally because of this) and she can count to 20, so she’s probably getting bored by the Upper Twos class, since they’re still working on that stuff there.
So we were talking about my Special Little Snowflake and how brilliant she is (naturally), and I was thinking about Catie’s upcoming playdate at Nicole’s house and how much it threw me when Nicole suspected that Catie had SPD, and the thing I wrote yesterday about her going down the slide… And I just blurted out and asked her if she had noticed if Catie ever displayed any signs of Sensory Processing Disorder. She looked a bit surprised, but she said that she’d spent quite a bit of time in that classroom (filling in when one of the other teachers was out sick), and that she’d never noticed anything remotely abnormal about her.
I said, “Well, you know, she is scared of swings and she only recently decided that the slide was ok, but she still hates her tricycle…”
She said, “Yeah. But, she’s THREE. It’s not the same as it would be if she was scared of those things at 5 or 6 years old.”
I admit it, I sort of breathed a sigh of relief. (And no, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with kids who have SPD, or that it’s bad, or whatever. Some random person showed up the last time I wrote about it and completely took what I was saying out of context & was offended, so I’d like to just state that up front. I am not blasting your kid. I’m just talking about my own.)
Of course, when I talked about changing classes with Catie herself, she was dead set against it. They’re going to ease her in and let her spend a couple of hours in the preschool class here and there, and let her gradually make the shift. I think it’ll be really good for her.
And for the record, the playdate at Nicole’s house this morning was fine. She and Kiersten hugged both when we first got there, and again when it was time to leave. I love that it seems easy for her to make friends. I already knew she adored her cousin. It’s nice to see those friendships develop with non-family members too.
I picked her up from Nicole’s house around 11, and she got upset when I said that I was going to take her to daycare. My gut instinct knew that she wanted to spend time with me, not just get shuttled from one place to the other. So I decided that work could wait for a little while, and I took my favorite girl out for lunch.
Mommy Time FTW! The chicken nuggets and french fries didn’t hurt either.