I wrote a few months back about choosing a nursery for Ethan, and you may have noticed that you haven't heard much about it since then.  After an unfortunate situation of not moving to the house that we had planned to, and with everything happening then (moving into a temporary home, Ivy being born, etc) we decided that we would wait for Ethan to start nursery.  We have now found a lovely nursery, and we have been having settling in sessions for the past six weeks.  I think it's quite rare to settle in for such a long time, I suppose it's because it is a full day nursery, but I think that it has made the transition easier for all of us.  Ethan won't be attending the nursery for full days, as we don't need him to (and I wouldn't know what to do without him home with me!) but he will be going for three sessions a week.  It seems strange since many schools are now ending for summer, but as this is a nursery that runs all year round, Ethan is just starting now!

We've been doing a few different things to prepare Ethan for nursery.  We got out his little backpack and chose some spare clothes to go in it together.  We've been reading books about starting nursery, we really like Maisy Goes to Nursery.  It's a simple book that goes through all of the regular activities of the day at a nursery school, it's been a great way to start conversations about all of the things that Ethan will do while he's there.  We've had to be quite careful when choosing books, as a few seem to start with the child being nervous to start school, and I really don't want to put ideas in Ethan's head that anyone would be scared about nursery or wouldn't want to go.  That's why I like the simplicity of this one, we would love more like this, please let me know if you have any recommendations.  From the book it was easy to incorporate a day at nursery into our imaginative play.  We would take turns being a teacher and a child at the nursery, and do the different activities.  We also talked about all of his friends who already go to nursery and all of the fun that they have!

Throughout the six weeks of settling in Ethan has been absolutely fine, the very first time that I left him they were making fruit salad, so he didn't even notice that I had gone.  When I came back he was happy and smiling, and very excited to show me what he had made.  As the weeks progressed, the sessions got longer and they varied through different times of the day.  Ideally we didn't want Ethan to do any afternoon sessions, but as that is all that was available he will be spending one afternoon a week at nursery.  This means that he will be there for nap time, and unfortunately this has been a bit of an issue.  Everything else has been fine, but sleeping at nursery has, for some reason, made him very sad.  It is absolutely heartbreaking.  I know that we have been very lucky that Ethan had settled so well, so there was bound to be a stumbling block.  The things that we've done to help Ethan were to talk a lot about it, to make him feel that he can tell us any of his worries.  We chose a soft toy from home that he could bring into nursery with him to cuddle, to try to make it a more comfortable environment for him.  And the only other thing I could think of, was to tell him that he just didn't have to nap there.  I know that it will be very disruptive to his routine not to nap, but I just can't handle seeing him so sad.  We will see how it goes for a few weeks, and I would love any other advice, but I have a feeling that we might just drop down to two morning sessions a week as soon as we can to avoid nap time altogether.

The final bit of preparation for nursery was to get Ethan some labels for all of his clothes.  He's just got the hang of potty training, but there are bound to be some accidents (and he gets his tshirt wet from playing in the water at almost every session!) so his clothes need to be easily identified.  We ordered some cute iron on labels from Labels4Kids as well as some bag labels and other labels that were part of the Back to School pack of Easy to use Iron On Labels that sells for £24.  This way his clothes are labelled, as well as his shoes, bag and water bottles and snack pots.  It's great to know that we'll be able to identify all of his things, and we won't be losing anything at nursery.  I was also able to choose a design to go on the larger labels, so we went for a fire truck (you can see it on the bag label in the photo).  That way even before Ethan knows how to read his name, he'll be able to recognise the fire truck on all of his things.  The iron on labels are easy to use (even for someone like me who never irons!) and stay on the clothing really securely.  


* Labels4Kids sent us the Back to School pack of labels to try out and review, the other products mentioned in this post were bought by us, but do contain affiliate links.  For more about our review process, please click here *