Gettin' Me A Life

Let me preface this whole post with the following:

I love my child. I love my life. I love everything in it. I would not trade one day with The Bambina for one thousand days of my former life.

That said...

We start three days of day care next week and I cannot stop feeling guilty for being happy, relieved, thrilled and excited.

The truth is, she is going to love day care. Already she gives me that look around 3pm as if to say, "Um, do you have anything else in the back? Is this all you have? Are these all the toys I own? Are two trips to the park all you've got in the schedule? Oh. I see. Well, that's fine. No really. It's fine. I'll just go over here and dial Zimbabwe on your cell phone, then..."

She is now at the age where she likes other kids, most definitely holds her own against the slightly older boys at the park, and really does need to learn to share. Being with other kids for 6 hours a day, three days a week oughta be just the thing for her. It will also make our day together and her one day with her local grandma all the more novel and fun.

It's all good. For both of us. I will finally be able to do the following:

*Work during business hours and not from 8pm till 2am after she has gone to bed
*Schedule client phone calls for hours other than nap times
*Exercise for the first time since FEBRUARY. Yeah. February. That's no typo. I have not set foot inside a gym or on any gym-like apparatus since February 2005. And my ass is the proof of that fact.
*Eat my lunch like a normal human, rather than stuffing something down my cakehole in 30 seconds flat so I can make sure she gets her lunch.
*Eat peanut butter, shellfish and drink Diet Coke till I bust. All of the things kids can't eat but that they want to eat off your plate--it just becomes easier to not eat them than to constantly have to police whether she has brushed her finger over your peanut buttery toast in the AM and therefore runs the risk of some horrifying allergic reaction you have been told is inevitable.
*Finish a sentence. And by that, I mean a sentence that does not include "yes! you are holding the Yellow Ball!" or "What does a tiger say?! Roar!!"
*Read the paper. Online or, gasp, even a good old-fashioned paper-paper. Who knows? I will once again have a single clue about current events. Never again will I embarrass myself by saying, "Katrina pounded New Orleans? Wow. Now, was she the former p*rn star on Survivor or the prissy one from The Apprentice?"

Yes, it is all good. She is going to love it. I am going to love it.

And, yes, I am going to drop her off for the first time, smile, wave, and then head to my car and cry just a little that my baby is growing up.