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Here is how not to get ready for your baby girl’s first day of daycare:

First, while it might seem like a good idea at the time, I do not recommend spending the previous week visiting your mother-in-law in St. Louis, having a lovely time, receiving lots of help with child care, and generally forgetting why you so desperately wanted to leave your baby somewhere you are not for a few hours every day in the first place.

If you insist on having that lovely vacation talking to adults and taking showers whenever you’d like (if, say, like me, you are facing a week when your son’s school is closed and you do not feel the least bit equipped to care for a two-and-a-half-year-old in addition to a three-month-old all by yourself to the point where you are kind of even looking forward to an airplane ride with the two of them if it will free you from this prospect), try very hard not to have the airline lose your bags on the way home.  I seriously doubt the vintage-1983 car seat United loaned us was the cause of Jake’s sudden awakening to howls of apparent pain on the long ride back from the Greenville airport, but the situation was far from an ideal end to our trip.  Furthermore, I suffered a general sense of discombobulation on my one-day buffer between travel and the start of school and, worse, didn’t get a chance to wash the darling dress in which I had planned to have Lily begin her new adventure, having rather stupidly packed it.

Try, too, to approach your last day before school starts on more than five hours of sleep or, if that is simply  not a possibility in your infant-caring days, consider not dragging yourself cheerfully to the swimming pool to thoroughly exhaust yourself, your three-month-old daugher, and your two-and-a-half-year-old son.  Especially do not follow this frivolity with shopping for groceries on your last few molecules of adrenaline while your husband whips up a beautiful meal for a visiting friend with whom you sit on the deck enjoying the evening air until past nine o’clock only to face the prospect of cleaning up and making your son’s lunch in a sleep-deprived stupor that greatly disappoints the friend who was quite reasonably hoping for a little conversation as he loads the dishwasher.

Most importantly, however, you should never, ever, ever wait until ten o’clock the night before your daughter’s first day of daycare to discover that you own only a single bottle suitable for her dining enjoyment while at school.  Because that means you will spend the morning before she starts in a bit of a panic trying to fit her nap in before a mad rush to Target to buy more bottles, which must be sterilized at home while she waits patiently in her car seat (on the kitchen floor, not in the car; no need to call Child Services) so you can rush unceremoniously into her new school out of breath and utterly disorganized.

Of course, I could have done everything right, taken all my own advice, had her diaper cream purchased and labeled twenty-four hours in advance, and none of it would have mattered.  Because nothing else in the world matters when you leave your darling, tiny infant sleeping in a strange crib and walk across the street without her to your car, your heart singing in pain as something that feels like a serrated paring knife neatly severs it into big, raw, hurting pieces.
Continue reading ‘First Day of School (Infant Remix)’