farewell, mat leave

 

 naters @ 14 months

so this week i finally bid a fond adieu to my mat leave year. i'm officially back at work 3 days a week (permanent part-time), but took a couple days off this week in order to transition nathan to daycare. today was his first day, though it was only for a couple of hours. we're easing him into his new care environment so 2 hrs today followed by a half day tomorrow. then tuesday, it'll be full steam ahead! i plan on leaving work early so that it's not like he gets dumped for a 10-hr day after 4 days of just being at home with mommy and daddy again. don't want it to be too big of a shock to his system. we decided on a small home-based daycare for our lil guy. the house is very close to us and is part of the wee watch system. a friend of a friend has her son in the same house and only had great things to say about the daycare provider. so i dropped nathan off this morning and left without any tears. when i went back to pick him up a couple hours later, the woman told me that he acted perfectly fine and had a fun time chasing after the other two kids there. apparently he was quite generous with doling out the hugs to the other kiddies. yipes! i'm already paranoid thinking about the kiddie germs! :oP

tomorrow i plan on leaving nathan there to take his afternoon nap. this will be the ultimate test since he has been rather difficult to get to sleep these days. we have to carry him and pat him until he falls asleep, but i don't know that this woman will have the time to do that if she's got two others to care for. when i mentioned that, she didn't seem too phased and said that it was the same for her own three children. i'm thinking that there will definitely be some tears tomorrow! also feeling a bit worried about the whole drinking situation since nate is still really terrible with the cup. he's okay with drinking water, but he wants nothing to do with formula. sigh. i hoping that being in daycare will help with the whole drinking thing. fingers crossed for a good day tomorrow...