Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Barrett's First Day of Mother's Day Out

As you know I've been taking Barrett to work with me since he was 5 weeks old.  Luckily he is so laid back that it has been working perfectly.  My boss is amazing and I'm pretty sure he likes Barrett more than me.  When I was pregnant I knew I didn't want to work full time and I knew that daycare wasn't going to be an option with my current job because I would have barely been making enough to cover the cost.  My boss said I could bring him at first and we could just see how it went.  Well almost 20 months later I'm still taking him with me.  I'm so thankful that this has worked out.  I love working because it gets me out of the house and I get to be creative while making a little money to help support my shopping habits my little family.  I also am blessed to pretty much make my schedule each week so we can still have play dates with friends and that kind of fun stuff.  It really is the best of both worlds.  
I was talking to a friend this summer and she was talking about putting her son in Mother's Day Out and her son and Barrett are about 6 months apart but they have always played really well together.  She was talking about how she couldn't leave her son anywhere because he was so attached to her, which we were having the same problems. Patrick and I started talking about it and praying about it.  Barrett still does great at my office but he's starting to not want to be confined for 6 hours a day and who would.  So we made the decision to enroll him in a local program.  It's two days a week from 8:30-12:30 and it's 5 minutes from my office.  So I'm able to drop him off and go to work and then go pick him up and go back to work.  I knew it would be good for him to be away from me for a little bit of time each week.  It would also be good for him to learn to take direction from someone other than family.  I knew it would be good for me also to let go a little and to trust someone else with my son.  Our early intervention coordinator and speech therapist also said it would be good for him to be around other kids.  So I know this is the right thing to do right now.
Today was his first day since he was sick last week.  It went about as well as you'd think.
This pretty much sums up the morning. Ha! 

He was very skeptical of my picture taking.

He likes wearing his backpack.

Trying to get a good picture of him before we left.

This is the best I could get with him holding his sign.  (It was so humid my lens started fogging up.)

Patrick was off today so he went with us to drop him off.  They have a car line but we had to go in the first day to fill out the paper work.  Patrick held him and I'm glad he did because I don't think I would have been able to put him down while he was upset.  He did fine playing while we were in the room talking to his teacher.  We could tell something was up when we left the classroom to put him in the bye bye buggy for the morning stroll.  His friend Drake was there and we put him in the buggy beside him and he started crying.  Then Drake started crying.  It was awful.  His sweet teachers assured me they would both be fine and she immediately took them on a ride.  It was heartbreaking.  The funniest part was the other two kids were just looking at them like, "get it together kids, it's not so bad, your mommies are going to come back to get you."  I wanted to sit in my car until it was time to pick him up.  I knew he would be fine.  He does that when I leave him with anyone.  But it doesn't really make it any easier.  They sent me a picture about 15 minutes later and he was fine and playing.  I was so thankful.  Before I knew it, it was time to go pick him up.  His teacher brought him out to my car and he was happy to see me but he was trying to act like he was mad at me.  It was pretty funny.  She said he did great and he and Drake played together.  He ate his whole sandwich at lunch and barely used his paci.  I was so happy.  When I got back to work my boss asked him if he had fun at school and he said, "no".  I'm glad he did good, I hope drop off gets easier.  I'm already dreading it on Wednesday.

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