The 2024 school year has officially started and regardless of whether you’ve been back for a few weeks or a few days, sending your kid off to kindergarten comes with a lot of change and some big feelings. We asked two moms, one who sent off her oldest and one who sent off her youngest, to put some of those feelings into words for us

Holly:

To the parents feeling all the feels right now..... 

I don't know about you---but something that I wasn't prepared for as a parent was how I would feel watching my oldest head off to Kindergarten. 

Cue the tears and pass the tissues.

I honestly still cannot believe it. They were right when they said the days go slow but the years go fast. Sometimes I feel like I went from researching bottles to backpacks in the blink of an eye. 

My daughter used to need me for everything, and now she walks downstairs dressed and ready to go. I can already picture the years starting to flash before my eyes.... new friends, sports, clubs, dances, and (gasp!)....graduation. 

On the days that I find myself begging time to slow down, I remind myself that the best part of being Harper's mom is that I get a front row seat to see who she is becoming. Instead of focusing on what I’m losing, I try to think of which exciting milestone is next -- learning how to tie her shoes, losing her first tooth, and learning how to read! I can’t wait to experience these moments with her and see them through her eyes.

As you can imagine, there have been lots of emotions for both of us. We're saying ‘goodbye’ to the pre-school where she learned how to make friends and ‘hello’ classrooms with new faces, rules and expectations. For her, it’s a new phase of growing up and learning to adapt to a new environment. For me, it’s seeing the bigger picture of my role as her mom – I’m not raising her to be my daughter, I’m raising her to be her own person in this world.

So for now,  I'm choosing to embrace every moment, smile through the tears, and cheer her on every (bittersweet) step of the way.

Emily:

As a working mom, I had to embrace very early the idea that my children’s lives would be full of other people who would get to love them and shape them into the people they are supposed to be. From six weeks of age, my daughter had a nanny. Our nanny became part of the family, and helped to support us through my 6-month deployment to Afghanistan when my daughter was 15-months-old. Watching someone else fill in for me from afar was incredibly hard, but I chose to view it as something beneficial. My daughter was loved and cared for, every second of every day, by people I loved and trusted. It stung a little that it wasn’t always me, but I gladly accepted any and all positive influences in her life. 

This philosophy carried over as my daughter started school. I had already lived through leaving her for half a year. I could certainly stand to live without her for 7 hours a day, knowing that she was learning and growing into who she was meant to be. As it turned out, the feeling was mutual. Our daughter confidently leapt into school, embracing the new experience with gusto. 

I only deployed once, and as such, had never been separated from my second baby. Even so, I remember the excitement of the days and weeks leading up to my youngest starting kindergarten. He was so ready. He had been watching his big sister go off to school and leave him for two solid years. He could not WAIT to climb the steps onto that school bus himself. He barely even let me sneak in a hug before we began the long walk to the bus stop. I was so thrilled for him, there was hardly even room in my heart for anything remotely mournful.

We are a family made up of two working parents, so the day our youngest started kindergarten was a huge deal, as it is the official transition into the next phase of having school-aged children. There are new challenges, too, as we continue to juggle last minute arrangements when one or both children inevitably gets sick. The constant barrage of emails from school and sports leads to a very full family calendar, but there is something fun about helping our kids lean into their interests and grow as individuals. 

The older my kids get, the more people they have around them, pouring into their lives. Teachers, bus drivers, school administrators, coaches—they all have influence on my kids, and show them slightly different perspectives on how to live. I welcome them all, and am often pleasantly surprised by how these exposures to other people help spark conversations at our dinner table. From the moment they are born, our children begin a long journey toward independence. Sending them off to school is just another step in the right direction.