Today was Elyse's first day of school! She's in the Toddlers class at St. Matthew's Preschool, the same class--though with two different teachers--in which Jessica started school three years ago.
We think she's really going to love preschool; she loves playing in the nursery on Sunday mornings, and preschool, in the Toddler's class, anyway, is just a chance to do that for three times as long, more times per week.
She was a little nervous when I left her, but she didn't cry, and she got comfortable and started playing fairly quickly. Ms. Jill and Ms. Nan told me that Elyse spent the whole morning taking care of the various babies in the room (the pretend kind, not her classmates). That didn't surprise me, since lately she's been very concerned with her babies at home, and sometimes has two or three under her care at once. (It's especially cute when she makes crying noises for one of them, then picks her up and gives her a big hug and pats her back and says, "'K, 'K.")
When I came to pick her up, she gave me a big smile and pointed at me and hopped up to go; she even knew to go get her backpack before we left (though she couldn't quite reach the hook on which it hung, so she just pointed at it and made urgent noises at me).
It was a very emotional morning for me, naturally, but fortunately today was the first day of the English 1101 section I'm teaching at Gwinnett Tech this semester, so I had that to keep me from worrying the whole time about how Elyse was doing (even though I knew she would be doing just fine).
Here are some pictures we took this morning, after the girls had gotten dressed but before we had to leave to be there:
(Elyse was not nearly as cooperative as these pictures suggest. Jessica did a great job of acting as a child wrangler and helping me get some good pictures.)