Maile Girl - all ready for her first day of school!
As we mentioned last week, today was Maile’s first day of preschool. We’ve been talking about it for weeks, so I think Maile was genuinely excited as we got all packed up this morning. (Perhaps too excited as she had one of her worst nights of sleep in months last night – hence all the tired looking faces in the family picture below!)
Family Picture - Maile's first day of school
We, honestly, had no idea what to expect when we got to school. On one hand, Maile is generally pretty sociable, but lately around strangers she was a bit clingy. (Dad note: We decided to leave the cameras at home for the first day – we didn’t want anything to get in the way of Maile getting settled in.)
I have a feeling we'll be chasing her from here on out...
Things went pretty smooth when we arrived at the school. We went a bit early and were the first ones there. Maile instantly started exploring the classroom and met a couple of her teachers (“lao shi”). Maile’s school does a Mandarin immersion program – so the teachers or lao shi speak a combination of english and mandarin. I have no doubt we’ll be exploring this fact more in the months ahead…
Funniest part of the drop off was when Maile found the bathroom. They have a bunch of toddler-sized toilets. Maile went right over and said she wanted to get on the “potty” and started taking off her pants. Sure enough, she jumped right onto the toilet and sat there for about 5 minutes. She didn’t actually go, but afterwards, she grabbed some toilet paper to wipe herself, flushed the toilet and washed her hands. The teachers were pretty impressed that she was potty trained. Of course, that’s the first time she’s ever done that!
There were definitely some tears and clinging as we left, but the school called about an hour later to say that Maile only cried for a few minutes and then settled in great to the class activities.
Chris went to pick her up for a half day at 12:45. Maile was all smiles and tonight at dinner said she was looking forward to going back tomorrow!
Maile's teachers sent home a fun personalized "report" of her first day - definitely a "nice touch"!
All in all, definitely a successful first day of school!
(Dad note: I haven’t fully decided how I’m going to handle blogging about Maile at school – which is why I didn’t link to the school directly. More than happy to talk about it though if you want to ping me directly – we’ve been very happy so far!)
