With just a few weeks to go until Leo starts school and the next journey of his life, I just wanted to reflect on his journey at his nursery as he has recently graduated from
With just a few weeks to go until Leo starts school and the next journey of his life, I just wanted to reflect on his journey at his nursery as he has recently graduated from there, so cute!
As you can all imagine, making the decision to let Leo attend nursery after losing Millie at nursery on just her third day there through a choking incident was one of the hardest decisions we had to make.
When Leo was born, I was absolutely adamant that he would not be attending any type of childcare for any reason, how could I let him when we lost his sister in a nursery? How could we ever trust anyone ever again to look after our son? How could we believe that anyone would look after him just as we would? How would we cope with not having him with us? It made me want to curl up in a ball and cry just thinking about it.
But we did. We eventually chose to put him in a local nursery to us called Elm Cottage.
You can read here in another blog I wrote last year, about how we came to the decision to let Leo go.
Anyway fast forward nearly 2 years and Leo has just left Elm Cottage and is so excited for school.
We honestly cannot thank Steph and her lovely team of ladies at Elm Cottage enough for what they have done for us, for Leo, for our family. They are an amazing group of ladies and without their help and patience with us, we wouldn’t have got through this journey of nursery with Leo.
Chocolate Slime Making at Millie’s Trust Fun Day … BOOK NOW
Yes, it’s been hard but they’ve worked very closely with us to ensure that Dan and I were happy with items that Leo played with at nursery, ate at nursery and any outings that they had. (Yes, I nearly had a heart attack about a trip to Eureka – but we did it, we let him go with some help from daddy), we even let him travel on the minibus with his friends because he was so excited.
There’s been two elements of nursery for us.
The first was Leo.
Why should he miss out on what all the little people his age were doing?
Why should he be left out of meeting new friends because his parents were scared?
Why should Leo not gain that independence that nursery gives because of an accident his sister had before he was born?
The second was us.
How would we cope if we kept Leo at home until he started school at the age of 4 and half? How would we deal with him not being with us 6 hours a day and in the care of someone else 5 days a week? This wouldn’t be good for our mental health.
It was the best decision that we could have made for Leo. His speech in particular came on leaps and bounds when he had other children to talk to all day on the two days a week that he attended. We followed what he was being taught at nursery when he was there and encouraged him to continue his learning and development at home in the same manner and he has graduated being this confident, little independent funny young man and we are so proud of him.
He has made some lovely little friends there in particular L&H who are going to be in his class at his new school and who knows, they could be friends for life (I hope so, as their mums like a Gin 😂), seriously though – he wouldn’t have made these friends so young if we hadn’t have gotten through our fears and let him go.
One of my favourite things that the nursery worked with us on is Millie. They were very open to how we wanted Millie to be talked about to Leo and how we wanted them to talk about Millie if Leo brought her up. We are an Atheist family following losing Millie, so we don’t believe in Heaven or anything from the book, so it was very important to us that this is how they talked about Millie to him. They’ve been amazing. I know that Leo has talked about Millie lots when he has been there and they even had Millie’s photo up on the family wall for Leo to see – little things like that mean the world to us and reminded us that we had found such a great nursery for him.
So fast forward 2 years, hundreds of drawings and paintings done, stones collected, friends made, clothes with paint and glue on, ducks hatched, butterflies grown and let fly away, his first friend birthday parties and much much more and suddenly we have a graduation day.
Here he is winning his “Mr.Creative” award from the nursery staff that he was so proud of.
And yes I cried. I blubbed my bloody eyes out, thanks for that Elm Cottage! 😀
(Oh did I mention that Elm Cottage are an awarded Millie’s Mark nursery too)
Look out Elm, Asher is next 💙💙💙!
