Baby's First Day of School, or Mama's having an anxiety attack.

Last night, I conscientiously packed Mia's daycare bag. Diapers, wipes, blankets, bottles, formula, etc, all labelled "Mia C" just in case picking a first name in the SSA's top 10 (#10) for 2010 is already going to bite us in the ass. I didn't pay any toys, since they have plenty, but she's got lunch for all five days this week (even if she's only going in for 4 days). It's going to be a lovely day (88* and sunny), so they said that she might be able to go outside with the one year old class, if she seems mobile enough for them. I assured them that she was almost walking (which she is) and would be just fine cruising from one tiny piece of playground equipment to the other.

B did the first drop off and said that she made an upset face when he put her down on the playmat, but that she didn't cry. She usually does just fine whenever we've left her with other people, and she doesn't realize that we were gone until we're back. There was another little girl her age already on the mat, so I expect she'll just follow her lead. I'm willing to bet that her spending time with all these walking kids will get her walking unassisted in no time, too. She's already climbing in and out of boxes. Hopefully, she won't get upset in the next few days, once she realizes that going to daycare means being away from Mamam and BaBa.

As is often the case, I will be the one who will have the most difficulty adjusting to this new routine of ours. I realize that a working parent should be used to not spending 100% of their time with their baby, but I am NOT USED TO SPENDING TIME AWAY FROM MY BABAY! It was supposed to be a good week to transition. I had an Big Thing scheduled for the 18th, so much so that I was getting stressed out last week about when I was going to have time to do all this paperwork while Mia was demanding that I sit on the office playmat with her so that she could pretend to put things in my mouth. So, starting today was great. I'd have the first three days of the week to prepare for this Big Thing, two days to send the documents to the Chicago office and go over the documents with them, just in time to be available by phone starting the 18th until who knows when this Big Thing would be concluded.

Instead, I got on the phone with Government Inspector in charge of Big Thing this morning (Government Inspector had last week off, so I could only speak to him once I was already one week into prep work) who was extremely friendly and told me that he was really only looking for one thing so instead of doing all that prep work my letter originally asked for, why don't I just send him those documents and he doesn't even have to make the trip out to the suburbs? Why yes, Government Inspector, we can do that. So the 20+ hours of paperwork I had planned has been condensed down to a cool two hours, tops. Half of which I've already done, since, you know, I've been working on this all week. Oh, and he gave me until the end of next week to send it to him.

Obviously, it's a huge sigh of relief not to have to go through Big Thing with Government Inspector, but now I've got all this time to think about various crazy mama things. (Are they wiping her little sensitive behind properly?? Did they find her pacifier?? How did my office get suddenly so huge, I am LONELY!) The daycare center has webcams, but THEY'RE DOWN! How dare they have technical difficulties on our first day of school??

update: I've decided to leave work at 4 today, so that I can sneak over and pick Mia up before B does. I figure, it's allowed since I took a 15 minute lunch. Plus, Mama should see what that little bug is up to!