My little baby toddler daughter is moving on up in her daycare. Cue The Jeffersons theme song. She’s leaving the toddler room behind. It seems like only yesterday when she left the baby room for the toddler room. And now she’s neither a baby nor a toddler. She’s a person.
Where does the time go? No, really? I know it’s a trite cliché. But I can’t believe she’s graduating to the next level at her paid daytime adult supervised institution.
To celebrate the daycare gave us a little booklet. The booklet is a compilation of pictures and her “art.” It’s a snapshot of her time there. It’s like a little toddler yearbook. A glittery, finger-painted, craft paper yearbook. It was heart-warming. It almost made my wife cry. We smiled and reminisced as we flipped through the pages and brushed the glitter of our clothes.
Has she really been a toddler this long? Is she big enough to leave the toddler room behind? Is she ready? I still remember how much of a transition moving from the baby room was and now there’s another graduation.
If she’s expecting a car as a graduation present, it’s not going to happen. Okay, maybe a small plastic Tonka truck.
She is graduating to the next level of daycare after all. It’s apparently pre-school. Pre. School. That means that she’s almost at school. That means I’ll have to help with homework soon and hire a tutor once math goes beyond multiplication. It means she’s growing up. She’s a pre-schooler.
*Sniffle*
If I can borrow some lyrics from the Pachelbel’s Canon-sampling Vitamin C song Graduation (Friends Forever);
“I guess I thought that this would never end
And suddenly it’s like we’re women and men.”
“Cause we’re moving on and we can’t slow down
These memories playing like a film without sound.”
“La, la, la, la:
Yeah, yeah, yeah
La, la, la, la:”
I wonder if they played that song at her little toddler graduation ceremony? Not that there actually was one. And maybe then she threw her tiny graduation cap into the air in a special freeze-frame moment. I hope so. That’s what you do when you graduate – even if it’s just to a room down the hall.
Image Credit: Adan Garcia
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