In our case, instead of making life easier, kindergarten has become the biggest commitment our entire lives revolve around.
Sofia adjusted to kindergarten really quickly and beautifully — she started playing with other children and has always been excited when it’s time to go. But the problem with timing has been there from the very beginning.
We enrolled Sofia in the afternoon group because she’s been a true late sleeper since the day she was born. She always used to wake up between 9 and 10 in the morning, so we couldn’t bring ourselves to wake her at 7 for the morning group.
Sofka’s group runs from 1pm to 6pm — but in practice it’s never a full five hours. First of all, she sometimes wants to nap before kindergarten, and sometimes she doesn’t. Then comes lunch, getting ready, and heading out — so we rarely manage to arrive before 2pm. On top of that, there’s an unwritten rule at the kindergarten that you pick up your child by 5:45pm at the latest, so parents can still get some everyday tasks done (vacuuming, washing up, taking out the rubbish…).
Worth reminding you that Sofia goes to a student kindergarten, where fees are significantly lower than other kindergartens — but in return, the daily responsibilities placed on parents are greater.
Whoever stays home with her — whichever one of us is in charge of taking her to kindergarten that day (because the other one has university obligations) — already knows they’re in for stress, rushing, and a day when they’ll barely get anything done for themselves, i.e. for their studies.
Sofia wakes up around half nine, has breakfast, we play for a bit — and then around half eleven we try to get her to nap before kindergarten. Sometimes this nap attempt went on so long that I eventually gave up and took her in un-rested. Which naturally means you already know there’ll be tears when you pick her up.
If she does fall asleep, that brings its own kind of problems. In the best-case scenario, if she wakes up after an hour, the race begins: getting dressed, lunch, out the door. And lunch can take up to half an hour, because she’s a “baby” who eats on her own — there’s no force-feeding here, and no rushing.
And as for neither Marko nor me having managed to get done at university what we’d planned — well, the child does go to kindergarten now, after all.
There’s No Such Thing as Instant Concentration.
When we finally arrive at the university — after all the running and rushing — we realistically need time to “return to normal.” So there’s not even a theoretical possibility of walking straight from kindergarten into the reading room and achieving instant concentration. At best, you start studying around 3pm. And then by around 4:45pm you’re already glancing at the clock every five minutes to see how much time is left before you need to leave to pick up Sofka. And that’s where the stress and pressure start again, because you’ve “gotten absorbed” in something or planned to cover a certain amount of material — with no chance of getting through it all in the time left.
I want to sleep when I want to sleep — not when it suits you.
You Can’t Programme a Child.
But setting all our “struggles” aside — so it doesn’t seem like everything revolves around us — we’ve actually noticed that this kind of schedule doesn’t suit Sofia at all. A small child needs a consistent routine — and we had hoped she’d develop one around the kindergarten timetable. Which clearly hasn’t happened, because you can’t programme a child, as I’ve emphasised on this blog more than once. This inconsistency with sleep — in the ideal case before kindergarten, in the more frequent scenario after it (which means she can’t fall asleep in the evening before 11pm) — simply doesn’t suit her.
So the past few months for us have passed mostly in rushing and chaos around the kindergarten run, rather than in anything else concrete.
The turning point that led to this realisation came when Sofia started sleeping in her own room. Her rhythm changed completely — for the first time in her life, she developed something like a real routine. She started waking up on her own around 8am, always sleeping after lunch, and going to bed already around 9pm. We noticed this during the school holidays, when she spent two whole weeks at home all day.
The Time We Have With Her Now Won’t Come Back.
The biggest problem with the kindergarten — in my opinion — aside from disrupting the rhythm Sofia had finally managed to establish, and aside from the fact that we can’t get as much done for university as we need to, is also that we’re sacrificing our time with her. And neither Marko nor I want that.
The most important thing for us is to spend at least a few hours of quality time with Sofka every day. The obligations are there and they’ll get done — but the time we have with her right now we can never get back. And she’s growing up incredibly fast.
That’s why we’ve decided to do something about it, because this can’t go on. We’re going to try to switch her to the morning group, which runs from 8am to 3:30pm, and we’re working on it now. If it works out, I’ll let you know whether anything has changed and how Sofia took the switch. And of course, whether it makes any difference to our studies too.
Wish us luck.
S-Mama
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