Thursday, June 16, 2005

Status Report

I’ve been calling Shef’s daycare every day around noon to see how he’s doing and to decide whether I should come rescue him immediately, or let him try to gut it out through naptime until three o’clock.

On the second day, Diana told me that I should come and get him – he was tired and crying and ready to go home. I raced out the door, of course, arrived breathless, and swooped him out of Tina’s arms.

“Ma ma,” he whispered pathetically. His eyes were puffy and he was weepy; but in the car on the way home, he listed the names of his new school friends.

“Ahn-dy,” he said. “Net! New-ah! Dew!”*

This was a good sign, I thought.

Sure enough, on the third day, he recognized the parking lot of St. Paul’s as we pulled in. “Pahw’s!” he exclaimed. “Ahn-dy!”

When I called at noon, Diana told me that he’d been crying a bit, but that they wanted to try him for nap. If he didn’t fall asleep, she assured me they’d call me to pick him up.

"Please do, I said. "I can come any time."

After 1:00, the beginning of nap, I checked my phone every five minutes, sure that it wasn’t working – that the ringer had been turned off or that my service was down. Surely, Shef, The Child Who Would Not Sleep, had not succumbed to the schedule at Paul's.

When I finally walked in to his classroom at 3:00 on the nose, he didn’t notice me at first. He was busy wandering around after Tina, pointing at things and talking to her. He had fallen asleep next to Terese at one, and had just woken moments before.

A miracle.


*I never know if I should quote Shef phonetically or write what he means. This is what he sounded like saying, “Andy! Nate! Noah! Drew!”

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