Walking Backwards

Shiny, happy, lovely day. Nico and I ran errands in north Austin today. Some of what we did:
- We went to Fry's to pick up my dad's computer
- We went to Zany Brainy and played with close-out toys
- We went to the clearance bookstore and bought a book on lawn care
- We bought all of our Whole Foods groceries (but we left our yogurt in Seanna's fridge)
- We ate brunch at Cafe Java
- We hung out with Aiden and Seanna at their place and then went to dinner
- We had ice cream
It was an altogether nice day. Aiden and Nicholas are buddies now which is a nice change from when they first met. Nicholas would screech and Aiden would cry. Tonight they chased each other around the ice cream shop laughing. Seanna and I spent most of the night talking about how we are handling the new life of toddlerhood. Its good to go out to eat with someone else who has a baby, too. The blame about the mess goes around. I realized that Nicholas is a lot happier if I don't rush him on errands and let him run around to explore for awhile. He had quite a bit of fun being allowed to just wander around the bookstore with me following him for half an hour. I think I am going to have to allow more time for my errand from now on.

I haven't written a post-preschool entry yet to record this momentous event. It has been a whole three days, so I suppose it is time to re-live it. It wasn't really all that bad for Nico's first day. I love his school and the people there are wonderful. They just had too many new toys for Nicholas to be concentrating on anything else. Add that to the fact that he was up until after midnight the night before because his daddy was home and that was too exciting to miss. He played with the stacking toys and the cars for the first half of class and wouldn't participate in any of the activities. He was interested in the other children if they came up, but didn't make any real effort to socialize. The last half-hour, he kind of fell apart. He wanted me to hold him the whole time and play with the toys that were on the wall. I was not to put him down by any means! I expect that he will get better with time, he just has to be given the chance to adapt. He doesn't do well in new situations and definitely doesn't like being told what to do. The director also agrees that he'll just involve himself at his own pace. The class is only for the next three weeks, so after that I am going to try to get him into a Gymboree program or something similar to get him used to class before he gets into the next session of pre-school this September.