Out Of The Frying Pan and Into The Nursery.

Prepare to be bored. Yet again I find myself obliged to jump into the whole "Should I Be A Stay At Home Mommy, Or Not" debate.

Finley has a temperature and a yukky snotty nose, so this morning I decided not to send him to the nursery he started two week’s ago.  Not because he is dying upwards. He isn’t.  But because he isn’t himself and I don’t want him to feel rubbish anywhere other than here, where I can do my best to make him feel better.

This isn’t to say that I don’t  think that the nursery are capable of looking after him. True, dangerously they seem to be incapable of understanding the whole glutton free thing, but I am hoping that this will sort itself out in the next few weeks, and I am also preparing myself for a lifetime of explaining that yes, cakes have glutton in them, but jelly is safe and thus there is no need to provide him with a banana and hope he won’t notice that the rest of the kid’s are enjoying a birthday party lunch…

It isn’t that. It isn’t even that I feel guilty that he has to go to nursery at all, simply so that I can create time to make BrocanteHome as wonderful as one day, I hope it will be. It’s simply that he is already struggling to understand why he has to go at all, why he has to be looked after by that "man" (actually a lovely  girl called Miss Evans) and why, when he has made it quite clear he doesn’t want to go (Do you like your lovely school, Finn? No. No. NO!), I still deliver him there twice a week. So to make him go, when he feels tired and hot and sniffly, just seem’s plain old mean…

Oh God, I am making excuses aren’t I?

Last week, a report by Penelope Leach, stated that children who are raised by their Mothers at home do significantly better than those who are farmed out to nurseries or, indeed looked after by childminders, Nanny’s or relations. While having Finley cared for by his Grandparents (the least favoured option by Leach) is not an option at all for us due to the fact that they all still enjoy full time job’s, this to my mind at least, would be favourable to having him cared for by a childminder in her own house, due I think to the fact that I am so firmly in favour of establishing a strong sense of "Home" in my child’s mind, that to have him spend however many hour’s in another woman’s house, to my mind at least, seems to blur the lines. Does that make sense?

And yet….

Last week I stood outside the nursery window and watched Finley sitting on a stool, crying by himself, while the nursery nurses attended to other children. If he had been at home he would not have been crying. If he had been at Nana’s house he would have been scooped up in a scrumptious Nana hug, and even if he had been in a childminders house, he would surely have been at the very least, noticed, and as such attended to however she saw fit. I don’t want him crying. Anywhere. But if he feel’s he must, I want him to cry somewhere, where his tears will at least be acknowledged, and he will be reassured, cajoled, or cuddled back into happiness.

So what to do? Take him out of nursery and wrap him up in cotton wool forever? Abandon my ambition for BrocanteHome and dedicate myself to making sure that my precious little boy is never ever contaminated by what amounts to the real world?

Of course not. The nursery is in the school I hope Finley will eventually attend, a couple of doors down the road. He is mixing with other children and experiencing boundaries and social pressure’s I could not erect for him. And he is more than ready for it.

It’s me who isn’t.