We live in a very urban and very old neighborhood, and behind our house (and most every house around) runs an alleyway. Ours is cobblestone and was in place when our house was built in 1905. The garbage cans are kept here and the garbage trucks use the alleys once a week. Many residents also have garages that open to the alleys, including us. Sadie (and Daisy) have always enjoyed their walks in the alley behind our house. While there are cars, they generally can't go but so fast over the cobblestones, and they are fewer and far between than those that whiz by in front of our house.
This picture, above right, was taken the morning Sadie started preschool at 18 months of age, 2 years ago. I am not sure what my mother was more upset about when I sent her this photo the night after it was taken... that I was putting an 18 month old baby into preschool or that I let her walk this far away from me in the filthy dirty alley to take this picture. (As recently as this past winter, my mother asked me when Mark and I were going to get out and wash the cobblestones in the alley behind our house as they were very dirty).
Sadie was not much bigger than her tote bag when she first started preschool 2 years ago, and here I am preparing for another year to begin tomorrow. The tote bag is now packed with all the supplies for the first day. Sadie's class of 12 is perhaps half filled with kids she knows from the last 2 years, or kids that she has met through our summers at Willow Oaks pool. Her very best friend Bella, who was born 2 days before Sadie and has the same size birthmark also on her left cheek, is also in her class and they basically had to be bribed to leave the school orientation last Friday. I have no doubt that Sadie will love her school this year as she has the last two years.
But tomorrow brings us a new nanny too, and we will say goodbye to Lisa who has been Sadie's caregiver 47 hours a week for the past nearly 3 years. Lisa came to us when Sadie was a very timid and shy 9 month old, never having been socialized by our first nanny (who was a sort of baby nurse, as she held Sadie nonstop every day she worked, but wasn't very adventuresome). Lisa introduced Sadie to story times, shopping trips, park adventures, her own family which runs wide and deep, and Bible Camp at her church every summer. Sadie is close to fearless, in large part due to Lisa's willingness to be on the go with her every minute of every day. But Lisa has talents that run larger and deeper, in fact, than being a nanny, and she would be selling herself short by not following them now in her 30's (cake making, being one of them). We were lucky to have her every day that she was with us, but it is time to move on to another caregiver. So tomorrow we will welcome Ashley, a new college graduate, with a whole new skill set in art (and a lot of energy too). Sadie's nervous, and she is torn.
Sadie asked me today how could she love someone new when she still loved Lisa. I pointed out how I loved my own parents, but when I met Mark and met his parents (another set of grandparents who Sadie knows and loves well) that I loved them too. I told her how I had room in my heart to love many friends equally. That love never runs out, and the more special people that are in your life, the happier you are. But the mind of a 3 year old is not quite sophisticated... there are times in my life that I even doubted this logic at far more advanced ages. She thought about it, you could tell that she was working through it in her own mind, and I think she trusts me enough to know that I am not lying to her. And she liked Ashley immediately when she met her, as did Mark and I, and first impressions usually hold true for me.
So the week will bring challenges I am sure. But this is the end of what we knew would be a summer filled with difficult challenges and transitions. New job for me, new nanny for Sadie. I am ready for "ordinary time" as they say in the Church calendar, and to settle into where we are. Wish us luck!
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