This morning I walked through the preschool courtyard with its colorful flags waving in the breeze outside classroom doors and smiled at the little ones still clinging to their parents while moms and dads attempt to gently pry chubby fingers from their legs. (Preschoolers are surprisingly strong.)

It almost feels like fall, windy and overcast, and I like it.

The last classroom I pass on my way to the parking lot happens to be the same one I dropped my now-4th-grader at on mornings just like this five short and long years ago. Her pre-k teacher, still occupying that same classroom, pokes her head out and waves at me. We have a bond, whether she knows it or not. 

Five years ago, I was mom of an only child. But my only child wanted a sister badly enough that she dreamed one up—and drew her on a family portrait at school one day, preschool-style (think wobbly circle heads with giant eyeballs and legs).

“This is my mom, and this is my dad, and this is me, and this is my baby sister!” she explained.

There was an awkward conversation the next morning when at drop-off, the teacher congratulated me as I hugged my daughter good-bye and sent her in to wash her hands.

“Hmm? What’s that now?”

I wasn’t pregnant, but in the coming year I would be, twice. The first, discovered on the morning of preschool graduation, would end in grief and pain. But just shy of a year later, God would give my daughter that sibling she’d been asking Him for.

I walk by that pre-k classroom and shake my head in wonder at the fact that here I am, five years later, dropping off another preschooler—God’s goodness and grace in the form of a little sister I at one time thought would only ever exist on construction paper.

31 days of paying attention is a month-long mission to document and give thanks for the everyday, mundane, and beautiful. It’s a series I’m writing for Write 31 Days, a yearly challenge in which bloggers pick one topic and write a post on that topic every day in October. Thanks for reading along! 

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