Starting school

I'm a little behind in my posting, but will be trying to catch up over the next few weeks. This feels like old news now, but it was a big change for us when it happened!

With the new year came several changes to our lives. I'd been fortunate enough to work from home for the first five months after Cordelia and Estella were born, but as the babies got older, working from home became more and more difficult. So, at the beginning of January, Cordelia and Estella started going to school.

They attend the same school Adelaida attends, making morning drop-off and afternoon pick-up a little easier than it would be at different schools, but it still takes about a half-hour to drop the girls off in the morning and fifteen minutes to pick them up in the afternoon. That combined with a thirty-five-minute drive each way eats up a lot of our waking hours.

My initial plan was to increase Adelaida's school time from three days a week to four days a week and put Cordelia and Estella in school three days a week -- so I'd be working three days a week, spend one day a week with Cordelia and Estella, and spend one day a week with all three girls. I quickly realized, though, that working just three days a week wasn't going to be enough to finish my dissertation, so I ended up putting all three girls in school four days a week. It is hard to be away from my babies that much, but I needed the time to work toward graduation!

Estella and Cordelia are both very comfortable at school, which makes it a little easier to leave them there every day. Their teachers, Ms. Adrienne and Ms. Erika, are great with the babies and have been very accommodating with my peculiarities, like using cloth diapers and feeding the babies only food that I provide.

Adelaida loves to help me take Cordelia and Estella to their classroom in the mornings and pick them up in the afternoon. She is so maternal toward them -- I put the babies down on the carpet and unload the bag of stuff (diapers, wipes, dirty diaper bag, bottles, breastmilk, food, sheets, blankets, extra clothes) while Adelaida gets the little girls toys. When I'm done distributing our stuff around the classroom, Adelaida leans down to Estella, gives her a kiss on the forehead, and says "Have a good day at school today, Estella. Be a good girl for your teachers, and Momma and your big sister will pick you up this afternoon. I love you." The routine is then repeated for Cordelia and we leave to take Adelaida to her classroom.

The transition to school has been pretty easy for both of the babies, with one exception. Estella has a really hard time sleeping at school. There is just too much distraction for her -- she lays down in her crib, obviously tired, but refuses to sleep. About half of the time she doesn't sleep at all, and half of the time she takes a 20- or 30-minute nap. She rarely sleeps more than 30 minutes and I don't think she's ever slept more than an hour at school. This makes for a very sleepy girl in the evenings! We've tried everything we can think of to get her more sleep at school, but nothing seems to work. Fortunately, she is a pretty happy baby, even when she is sleepy, so we don't have a lot of screaming or tantrums even when she doesn't sleep.