Pumpkin Patches

Yesterday, I went on a field trip to the pumpkin patch with Alyssa's class.

Now, I've done these field trips before (hay ride, pumpkin pickin', etc.), but never quite like this year. This was the first year I didn't have to hurry back to work, the first year I didn't have to obsessively check my crackberry and worry about what I might be missing and what people were thinking if I was unavailable.

Nope, not this year. This year, I was able to actually focus 100% on Alyssa and what she was doing. And it was really, really nice. She's grown a lot, emotionally, since kindergarten started. She interacts so much better with her classmates that I expected, and she's started to show a lot more independence. She still hung out with me quite a bit, but when it was time to go play with her classmates, she went to play. 

I talked with other parents some while we were there - there were a surprisingly large number of them on the field trip. It still feels a bit like a club that I'm not a member of, but I'm working on it.

And really, that's not the point anyway. The point was being there with the girl, enjoying spending the day with her. I feel like she and I are going to butt heads a lot as she gets older, but I think we have a lot better foundation now than we did 6 months ago. It's definitely been time well spent away from the working world.