So, how has the first week been?

It's the question everyone asks when a new term starts. Friends text it. Family ask it at Sunday lunch. Parents ask it at the door, half checking on their child, half checking on me. So, how has it been?

The honest answer is: satisfyingly exhausting.

Not the flat, foggy tired of the holidays. A different tired, the kind that comes from a room being properly used again, from voices and wellies and half-finished sentences filling every corner of the day. By Friday I was ready to sit very still and say nothing for a while. But it was a good tired. The kind that tells you something real happened.

Part of what makes the first week what it is, is that the routine you're stepping back into isn't actually the routine you left in July. It just looks like it on paper. Same timings, same rhythm of snack and story and outdoor time, but the ‘room’ underneath it has changed. New children who don't yet know where anything lives. New needs that the old routine wasn't built around. A key group that's shifted shape. You're not dusting off last term's routine, you're rebuilding it, in real time, while it's already running.

That shows up most clearly in the children themselves. Some walk in on day one like they've always been here, bags away, straight to an activity, no backward glance. Others need the whole week just to manage the bag, let alone the goodbye. Neither is wrong. The skill isn't picking one pace and asking everyone to match it, it's holding a routine with enough give in it to carry both at once, in the same space, on the same morning.

And then there are the parents. Nobody talks enough about the first week being theirs too. The hover at the gate a little too long. The mid-morning "how did they get on" that's really "did I make the right decision." In these early weeks, reassuring the grown-ups is as much a part of the job as anything I'm doing with the children, reading the nervous parent, noticing what they need said out loud, without ever making the child's settling about managing the adult's anxiety.

So that's the first week, really. Not one thing to hold, but four or five all at once, my own tiredness, a team finding its feet again, a room full of children settling at different speeds, and parents doing their own quiet worrying at the gate. Somehow it all has to sit in the same five days, and somehow, mostly, it does.

Ask me again in week three. But this week — satisfyingly exhausting feels about right.