School

School starts in six days. I asked Emily tonight if she was ready, and she said, "Yes!" with all the enthusiasm of the innocent. No one is asking me, but the answer is "Not yet." I look at her and still see the six year old.

I know. I've had four years beyond the usual time that parents wave goodbye to their first-grader; four years of watching her learn to read and write, know her numbers, do fun experiments. Four more years of sleeping in and Chuck E. Cheese on the first day of public school, and museums when no one's there. Four years of vacations in January or February, of not caring about proper handwriting, of Legos. But on Thursday next, she'll be dressed in her school uniform and off to begin a new chapter at Coram Deo.

It will actually be much harder than homeschooling, for both of us. For the first time, we'll be following someone else's schedule, and someone else's curriculum. (Actually, the first time using a curriculum at all!) Although she'll only be in class two days a week, the rest of the time she'll be doing a fairly large amount of homework.

All of this her idea, I hasten to add. Both kids have always been able to choose their direction in education, for the most part.

And I'll still have my homeschooler, Sean, starting his sophomore year. That has its own challenges, but I look forward to it. I'll be teaching his English class this year to him and six friends, and I think it will be a blast! Movies as Literature, with dashes of grammar and Latin. He'll take chemistry and geometry in outside classes, and we'll cover German and government and driver's ed together. A full year, all around.

I have a few more weeks of three day weeks at work, then I'll drop back to my usual day and a half schedule. Today was my last day at Corinth for the time being, and I'll miss it. With the moving around I've done in the last few years, I no longer have long-time clients, but recently I met a cat that I used to treat as a kitten. She's 17 now, and her owner has moved from Coppell to Corinth. It's the kind of relationship I miss. But S. Flower Mound Animal Hospital has proven to be a great place to work, and I look forward to continuing that relationship.