Today was Sparky’s first half-day of school. He didn’t sleep well last night, didn’t eat very much this morning, and had worried himself into a low-grade temperature and chills. We dropped Owlet off at daycare half an hour early (more on that in a moment) and drove to school, parked, and joined the throngs of parents and children walking to the schoolyard together. There were about five hundred people milling about, meeting up with friends and awaiting the morning bell that announced the arrival of the teachers with their class list posters decorated to reflect their chosen themes for the year, which they taped up on the walls of the school building so the kids could crowd around and figure out who was in which class. The boys were thrilled to find three of the four who generally hang out together were in the same class. (I feel a bit sorry for the fourth, who was missing his first day and who will be without his mates in a different class tomorrow.)

It was interesting to watch how Sparky’s body language changed over the half-hour I was with him. He started off a bit huddled into himself, holding my hand now and again. When he saw people he knew he relaxed a bit, waving and saying hi oh, so casually, though he still held himself guardedly. And when he saw his very best school friend, he called out, and I could see his body open up and relax completely. He hung around with them, laughing and talking about Minecraft, and it was as if the summer hadn’t happened at all.

His teacher seems very nice. He told me with great excitement that there’s a book on Star Wars vehicles from Episode One in the class library. (Dear Mlle Sophie: You scored a win with that one.) They did a self-evaluation exercise where they were asked to write something they’d had trouble with last year on a small card, then fold it up and hand it in. Sparky wrote ‘math: subtraction,’ which I find interesting, because I’ve never seen him have a problem with that; his difficulty in math lies in mainly in thinking through word problems. He thinks his teacher will keep the cards and bring them out near the end of the year so they can see how far they’ve come. This is the first year of Cycle Two, and they do the first half of the year in French and the second half in English. (After this, I believe it’s just about 50/50 all year long through the rest of Cycle Two and Three.)

Owlet is in her fourth week of daycare, or “cool,” as she calls it. Day one was such a success that the only way I could lure her home was by promising her a bagel. (She has recently become obsessed with fresh bagels. This is both good and bad, as we liv around the corner from a bagel bakery.) The second day I dropped her off, I hung around talking to the educator. After a minute she pointed to the stairs and said, “Shoes. Stairs, Mummy.” The message was very clear: Shoo, lady, you’re cramping my style. When I picked her up that afternoon, we got in the door at home and she started to cry, “No, play more, play….” I comforted her and told her she’d go back to “cool” again tomorrow. “Oh kay,” she said, somewhat suspiciously and grudgingly, like I might be trying to fool her. Napping has been successful, they started potty training the second week they were there because everyone had settled so well, and in general everything is going so well that it’s like she’s been doing daycare all her life. There has been a teacher switch, however, because the educator who was initially slotted to handle this small private daycare (a satellite one to the main daycare the director runs) pulled out in the second week. Fortunately, the director was already talking to someone who had worked with her before, negotiating to bring her in as a swing teacher, and she just stepped in to be full time instead. Owlet loves her, and loves all her little friends there, and it’s only a bit odd to think that she has a social life outside our sphere of responsibility now. She brings home art, and talks randomly about her friends, and in general is thoroughly in love with “cool.”

It’s terrific that school and daycare are only four minutes apart by car in the same neighbourhood. My round trip takes about fifteen minutes, including drop-offs. And it’s a relief to be able to focus on work during the day, all the more so because I’ve been working on back-to-back projects, the last couple of them rush jobs.