Last week my husband and I attended our son's very first parents evening at his nursery. I'm not sure if it's just me and I know I shouldn't put so much pressure on myself but I want my son to do well at nursery. To take out of it as much as he can and to develop as much as he can. The results had been evident as he seems to have skyrocketed and is doing so many new things in such a short space of time. His walking confidence has been admirable and he has such a gung ho attitude to learning (obviously there is a downside to a toddler wanting to literally throw himself into everything he does as I'm sure you can only imagine).
I wanted my son's development to be the most important factor when choosing a nursery but obviously through encouragement with care and affection. It's not that I didn't also look at the food they prepare or the way they care for the babies but I needed to know when it came down to it that they wouldn't molly coddle my son in my absence. Every opportunity is a chance to show or teach my son something new and I want him to be worldly, culturally aware and open minded.
We were informed that our nursery follow the Early Years Foundation Stages (EYFS) and that everything they do they assess along the guidelines set out in these stages. At my son's tender age, the development is encouraged through play but certain aspects of play i.e. learning to share with other children, learning to stack cups/duplo/rings when they are starting to approach one year old. I won't pretend to know or understand what these guidelines are or even that I have had the time to look and read them, what I do know is that clearly my son is doing well under these guidelines and that his nursery are obviously implementing them very well. Either that, or my son is a genius. Unfortunately, judging by his insistence on walking backwards or forwards covering his face for fun I doubt it is the latter.
We were greeted by our son's main key worker who seems a little too young to be looking after babies but who am I to judge as she seems to be doing a pretty good job at it. However, being that she is so young, she is super enthusiastic about EVERYTHING and talks at a million miles an hour and keeps on talking and talking and talking and talking and I could barely ask questions let alone read the books she was holding in front of me for all of the talking and talking and talking. You catch my drift. The enthusiasm fills me with confidence that she's fun for my son and has patience for him, something which I'm sure I have mentioned more than once is now occasionally what I lack. Then I actually read some of the content she is putting in front of me and my heart sinks. A little background - the nursery keep a scrapbook of everything they do week on week with photos and little diary excerpts and dates of little milestones etc. This is shown to parents every parents evening and then when the babies leave the nursery, the scrapbook is part of their leaving present. We also have a progress diary where they write in a little book every day he attends what he ate and drank that day, how many naps he's had/length of naps, the nappy changes and how his behaviour was and we had always noticed he seemed to be eating double at nursery but thought it was exaggeration...
So anyway, my son has been attending nursery since September and so much has changed in that short space of time. To put it into perspective, a couple of days after my son's first official day, he started crawling and pulling himself up, he had barely any hair and was a little waif. My son is still a little waif but has a full head of thick curly hair and is now running and mischievous. I would be in denial if I thought the majority of his development was down to me as I have barely known what to do at every stage. If it wasn't for my BabyCentre newsletter I would have no idea what my son would need for encouragement. Motherhood has not come naturally to me at all.
You can imagine my surprise though, when I start flicking through the scrapbook zoning out his key worker and seeing all of these photos of my son that I haven't taken and he's doing things I haven't seen him directly doing. He's smiling and playing and pulling himself up and developing right in front of my eyes through film. Then, I read some of the captions and excerpts... my son did this and my son did that and I think, hang on a second... he only started doing that at home last week but... he's been doing it at nursery for two months... Then I see more and more of these little excerpts where he has been doing things long before we got the opportunity to see him do them and my heart ached. Now I know that had my son not have gone to nursery, he would in no way be this advanced and I'm under no illusion that I would have been able to do the same/a better job alone. I am also aware of the fact that my husband and I had no choice but to send him to nursery as we couldn't afford for me to stay off of work for much longer if we wanted to continue to pay bills and own our house. Still, it hurt to see that my son was being a different person to the person we see at home. As my husband put it into perspective that we're not the same people at work as we are at home, it still struck me hard that my son would knowingly be a toddler at nursery but a baby at home. We don't treat our son like he is a baby, we definitely don't baby talk him or run to his aid every time he thinks he has hurt himself so I couldn't understand why he was so different. Then I realised, he is in a room full of his peers. He has no siblings here to copy and all he has are my husband and I. One part I do remember his key worker saying was that he prefers to play with the older kids, my son is trying to be older than he is to fit in and as a result is developing much faster than he would at home.
Part of me now is still cut up about it and I even shed a couple of tears writing about it but this is what I wanted. I wanted my son to learn, to advance and to developmentally thrive at nursery. This is exactly what's happening and the only person I have to blame is myself if I don't like it. I'm so pleased that he is doing well and maybe were it not for the fact he was developing so well outside of our home I would be ecstatic. It's just another self-inflicted mummy struggle I will have to come to terms with. I wouldn't be human if I didn't feel upset that it wasn't me that had done all of this and I shouldn't feel guilty and berate myself for being a bad mum because I had to send my son to nursery. Sometimes, I should just give myself a break and maybe even pat myself on the back that my son wants to learn and quickly but hey, that's another breakthrough for another day.
~AB~
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