timandfee

The amount of sleepless nights I have had about Alina starting nursery is unbelievable. Tim is all for her going, i think she is young. However i agree that maybe a few hours a day with other children will be good for her. She is really social, and loves going to the park and being with other people, so Tim thinks she will love it. I wish i was as sure!

Anyway when we did decide to let her go it was late in the year and lots of places were full.  Also there are no multi-lingual schools near us and quite a few places we liked do not take children before 18 months, so in the end we are sending her to a Catalan school in Gracia. It is a very organised  place - they have uniforms, need to have yellow towels and cups (yellow is the P1 colour this year!), and there is a book that we and the teacher fills in every day.  But  I don’t like it because the teaching of Spanish and English is minimal, and the class is big, 10 children to 1 adult. But it is new, and well managed, and it seemed better then the other options we had. (I am still looking mind you!) While the nursery is open 7.30am to 7.30pm Alina will go from 9.30am to 12.30 initially, and then depending on how she settles in, may sleep there, so go from 9.30 to 3. After this, she will still be with Loida, her nanny until 6.  So she will get plenty of time in the parks, by the beach and at the playground,and of course get Spanish teaching aswell.

All sounds good, and yet i am really unhappy about it and feeling like such a bad mum. I suppose it does not help that in our case I seem to be more of the traditional dad then a traditional mum! Tim gets to see much more of Alina then i do, and is her “primary caregiver” according to the books definition. It is definitely true that she is closer to him then me. I know this is normal, i leave the house at 9am and get back at 7.30pm; Tim, even though he is working, is in the house all day and takes her from 6pm when Loida leaves. I would not change the situation around and be a full-time stay at home mum, if i am honest work suits me and in fact I need to work, but while overall i may not feel that guilty about leaving for work every day (because tim is there), it does not mean that sometimes I don’t feel sad.

So back to nursery, my friends have all done different things, and as Alina is our first, there is no guidebook i can follow that will magically tell me what to do. But i wish i felt happy with our choice. Who knows, when she goes for her first day tomorrow, she maybe the happiest child in the block, but if not I know I will be torn up trying to decide what is the best for our little princess - in the end, even if it is nursery, it is the start of her school life, and at her age, i want it to be fun and something she loves…there will be plenty of time for the hard work in years to come. Anyway fingers crossed..we’ll see how it goes.