To School!

This is a fun time of year for me on social media.

I get to see people's younger kids all dressed to the nines, grinning like mad, so excited to start a new year of school, with their new backpacks and new shoes and ready for new adventures.

I get to see my friends' trucking their kids off to college for the first time. Or third time. It doesn't seem to matter... it's both exciting and heart-breaking for the parents. This year seems to have the greatest concentration of "off-to-college" pictures that I've seen so far. Maybe this has to do with my peer group's average age, when we started getting married and having families, many of whom are now of nest-leaving age.

I get to see my teacher friends' classrooms, monuments to ingenuity and the very sincere desire to instill in kids an enthusiasm for learning. These pre-school pictures remind me of the days when my mom was teaching and my sister and I would "help" her set up her room. We'd try to throw in our own creative touches, like pulling pictures away from the bulletin board to the end of the push-pin to create a 3D effect. Or providing pictures on the chalkboard that took us hours to draw and color, knowing they'd be erased ten minutes after class started. Of course, we also engaged in less academically-appropriate tasks, like racing down the deserted corridors on roller chairs while the teachers were doing in-service.

I love all of this, even though I don't do any of it. Even with homeschooling, we don't have an "academic year," and now that Daphne is older and we're unschooling, we don't really "do" school at all. But, man, I love the cheap office supplies this time of year! I love the colorful pens and locker decorations and smelly markers and those zipper pockets that go into folders. I love all of the boxed lunches ideas that are coming across my Facebook feed. When we received the paper (that's a newspaper, or a daily periodical that used to be printed and delivered to your very house back in the olden days) in Sherman, I'd even read the school lunches to see who had the best stuff!

There are a couple of not-back-to-school parties here in Austin soon. One is tomorrow, and it's huge, and we probably won't go because I'm not quite ready for Mal to try to tackle Barton Springs (it's so slippery and he can't tell me if he's too cold), and it starts before Daphne typically wakes up (wait, doesn't it start at noon? Yes. Move along.). There's another one in a couple of weeks that's an unschooling event, and we'll probably go to that. Having met several unschoolers at the convention last spring, I think those are definitely "my" people.

But here's the deal: I know a lot of people are going to be posting "not back to school" pictures tomorrow. I think that's cool. As long as we're all celebrating together. I just saw a post in one of the groups to which I belong, and it was some kind of blog about going back to school. The lady wrote, "Our kids aren't missing a thing." Well, probably not.

However, my decision not to send my daughter to school isn't a commentary on what you guys are doing with your kids. I'm telling you all: I trust you. I believe you're doing the very best for your family, and I support you! I don't feel like this is a competition and one of us has to "win." I feel like whenever we do right by our offspring, we all win. Okay? Your kids aren't missing a thing, either.

We're all doing what we should be doing (and if we're not, we should change, and support each other through the changes), and I just want you to know that if I post a picture of us at TCBY this week, eating free birthday (for me!) yogurt with the hashtag "not back to school," it's not to show off how much more awesome my existence is than yours. It's just because that's our reality as much as your back to school preparations are yours. And I think we're all doing an awesome job!

A lot of times, I'll post stuff about unschooling or gentle parenting, and I hope those never come off as my thinking that I have the parenting market cornered, because I don't. I'm always trying to figure things out, to fine-tune, to do better. Isn't that what most of us parents do?

So, whether you're just coming home from having taken your precious first-born several states away, or are just tucking your little ones in for a good sleep before the first day of AISD, or you're sitting next to the baby you just nursed to sleep... Keep posting those amazing pictures of these exciting times! I love living vicariously though you guys!

Mal's first visit to the zoo... The first animal he saw! :) #lifeisschool