December 6: Sunday 06/12/2020 Christmas Kindergarten Break-up Playdate

Wrapping up the year at Christmas time is a tradition and it usually means a packed social calendar with clashes, ‘bring-a-plate’ preparations, sporting / hobby club, and school break-up parties, a little bit of exhaustion, and a lot of heat.

COVID has changed so much, so there has been no socialising this year. There were a few small birthday parties here and there, but very quiet. The parents had been locked out of the school so no invites to the colour run and no disco nights. I haven’t met many of the kindy parents, and we were restricted to only having one parent at drop off. Despite all of this, we felt it will always be important to make an effort to know the parents of the friends of our precious girls. The upside of COVID is that it has been incredibly restful, the down side is that we have had to pull ourselves out of COVID hibernation, and it takes a lot of energy to get back into the social groove again.

This was Kirra’s final year at Day Care (aka Kindergarten). A place that we have been dropping our girls off every week at for 5 years. It has been their second home. At Daycare Both girls have taken their first steps, said their first words, and had started their academic careers their with their first teachers. It was the end of an era. No longer will be turning up every morning, sitting Kirra down at the table to join her Breakfast Club crew at Kindy before we travel to work. We have done this for both girls, for hundreds of mornings, and the day has come when we no longer are a attending family in the building that was once the girls home away from home.

Both girls have formed the friendships of their first 5 years of life at Daycare and have graduated from Kindy there, so we made a special effort to set up a playdate to play out the year. The vote was for the Waterpark and only four families were there due to a bit of sickness, but we wanted to catch everyone before the summer school holidays. Everyone did the ‘bring-a-plate’ with food to share and the kids played and played. It was pretty awesome and because it is only 4 mins drive away from our place we got there an extra hour early to play. The girls took great delight in tipping toy buckets of water over Mumma’s head, and I was dressed ready to get wet and have some fun. At one point we rested against a whale fountain and let the water spray over our feet in the sun. It was a really awesome excuse to get out of the house and spend time at play. The girls are my beautiful muses and motivate me, but sometimes we just need a little bit more of a reason to get out in the fresh air and enjoy the life we have. The parents are connected on social media (messenger) and we are likely to plan another playdate catch-up in January 2021. If we do that would be a bonus, but otherwise this was a lovely goodbye. I managed to get some shots of the girls early in the morning and put my camera down so I could have a play too. It was beautiful, it was summer, and in some ways, it was a go at trying out a new version of how we do December during a pandemic.