The other morning- Tuesday, to be exact- Susannah started preschool. Now, as you’ll recall from the gazillion and twenty posts I wrote (and read) leading up to Nora’s first day of preschool back in 2012- I think preschool’s a really big deal (for the parents).
Itty bitty Nora and I had chosen multiple outfits and talked her imminent daily routine to death before her first TWO AND A HALF HOURS away from me (for the very first time, ever). You may also recall the fact that Nora came to work with me as a nanny for the first 18 months of her life, so I viewed preschool as something wholly unnatural and weird and crying jag-worthy. (But honestly, as Nora so cheerfully put it the other day, “Mom, you cry when you’re sad AND when you’re happy!”)
But see? This is the problem. I’m trying to tell you about Zu’s first day of school…and it still becomes a Nora story. I mean, Zu’s not exactly Jan Brady, here, but it’s tough when trying to capture a milestone for a secondborn to not compare and contrast with the older kid’s experience- or simultaneously capture a milestone for the firstborn’s newest trick.
For example. When Nora went to school, I could’ve made a coffee table book of every single photo I took of things she ate and touched and wore and whom she greeted and how on that first day.
Susannah, however, got this:
Yes, Jasper, nap.
Don’t get me wrong, I love that picture. LOVE that picture. But it doesn’t do justice to the fact that Little Miss Zu was so very excited throughout the morning- until it was time to take pictures on the porch (where Nora does it every year).
Who ordered the daguerrotype?
Then she got silent. And she doesn’t normally “do” silent. She didn’t want to hold hands- even Nora’s. And in the car on the drive to school? I saw her bravely looking out the window and fighting nervous tears. Susannah! My upside-down monkey of warrior girl.
I nearly turned the car around.
Because in that very moment it hit me that this vibrant little person with her bobbed haircut and hedgehog backpack was neither the chubby-cheeked baby with the white blonde Flock of Seagulls hair of her infancy, nor the Big Kid we always group her into being with her sister. She was, as she says, a Medium Girl. One with a happily chosen outfit and a monkey in that hedgehog backpack for emergencies. One who knows all the rules and really, really wants to like school…but just doesn’t know enough about it, yet.
One whose middle name is Adventure (or Mae), but who went on that adventure for the very first time ever without her sister or brother or Mom or Dad.
And that deserves its own picture, all by herself.
Happy schoolin’, Susannah Mae. You’ll find your feet soon enough-
And then there will be no catching you.
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