Preschool goes like this for us - Andrea drops Val off and I pick her
up. This lets me get into work at a reasonable hour so I can leave to
go get her at an equally reasonable hour. Today I ended up working from
home, stupidly going for lunch at a fine Taco Bell near the school. I
had to pass it on the way back and let me tell you, it took every.
Ounce. Of. Strength. to not go get her at 2 pm.

But I had work to do (go figure, I ran into a clearcase issue I'd never
faced before, one that even had the cc support guy going 'oh, I'll need
to call you back) so I drove steadily past the preschool and went home
to finish up my work.

Speaking of work, the hell that was the end of last year and the
beginning of this year manifested itself in a really crappy first half
review. Sigh. Even though things are going better, the hell carried
over as half of my review so I'm now both newly motivated to kick ass at
work (this, of course, is a good thing) and stressed as hell about never
fucking up, not even a little.

It's not a great place to be. I'm doing my best to get past this place
but, sigh.

Anyhoo, enough about That Which Concerns Me The Most right now and back
to the day in preschool. I took a break from work around 4 and went to
get Val. I figured she could play at home while I finished up my work.

When I got there, the kids had all just had their snacks and were lining
up to play a game on carpet mats. Preschool apparently gets many many
miles out of a stack of carpet squares. Today's game was that they
played music while the kids marched on the mats. When the music
stopped, they were to sit back down. They were all set to start, Val
was sitting on her mat when she saw me.

Her face lit up, she waved and started to come over but I realized that
she wanted to play the game. So I stood at the edge of the room and
watched her march around, so proud of herself, showing me her school.
Yes, I'm tearing up as I write this, so proud of my big girl and her
very own life at school.

I stayed about a half hour, watching the mat game, then watching Val do
more than her share of mat cleanup. They danced (to a God CD, of
course) after that, again with Val following directions from the
teachers, beaming at me all the while. When it was time to go outside,
she decided it was time to go home at last.

She's had a great week, bonding with the other kids more and coming home
happy every day. And today, watching my confident little girl march
around on the carpet mats, I was just so proud.