Mother's Day Out

Tuesday was Maggie's first day at MDO. Actually, it was her first day anywhere without Momma & Daddy. We are blessed that one of us is always home with her during the day, so for 14 months Maggie has been at home and not in daycare. Because of this, she has become overly attacted and separation anxiety had become an issue with her. It is bitter sweet. When you bring in an abused/neglected child, you long for them to become attached, because they have most likely not experienced that before. And often times, they become overly attached. So, then you have to deal with breaking that and teaching them that when Momma or Daddy leave, we are coming back!

Maggie would have meltdowns if I went out to the mailbox without her (even though she could see me through the front windows).

All this to say, we were quite anxious about her starting "school". We had been talking about school for a couple of weeks ~ explaining that she was going to go somewhere and have lots of fun, play with lots of kids, have teachers, etc. We have felt very strongly that she needed to be around other kids but more importantly that she did need to know that we would be coming back for her.

Tuesday morning, we get to the church. Maggie can't get out of her carseat fast enough. She is so excited. She gets her backpack on (it's almost as big as she is!), grabs her lunch bag and then my hand and says - "let's go Momma". I said, "where are we going?" She yells "SCHOOOOOL!" Yep, just a LITTLE excited :) She is holding onto my hand, dragging me the whole way. We get to her room, she drops her backpack in mid-stride, at this point basically running in place, waiting to get in the room. And right as she's going in, I say - "hey...gonna give Momma a kiss?" She stops, turns around, smiles, gives me a kiss and never looks back. I sign her in, disperse all her many items, and take a sneak peek. She's already in the kitchen/doll area playing. I walked out with a huge smile on my face. I really worried that I might lose it and was praying that the water falls wouldn't open up, but when I saw how excited and happy she was ~ I couldn't have been happier for her.

I got home and thought...ok...wow...now what do I do? Those 5 hours were the quietest and long hours I've had in 14+ months. I think Momma's gonna like school, too :)

When it was time to pick her up, Maggie was sitting on the floor next to another little girl. Her teacher said, "Maggie look who's here". Maggie looked up, jumped to her feet, came running with a huge grin and said "Mommmmmma!" She ran into my legs, embraced me and said "momma back...momma back" Yes, Momma came back! You know that your children love you, but there's nothing better than truly feeling it...like I did Tuesday afternoon.