I always have mixed feelings about the first day of school.

There are the bright, shiny new backpacks and stacks of supplies and freshly-washed uniforms (good). There’s getting up early and packing lunches, and the long, quiet weeks after lots of summer time together (bad). There’s putting the kids to bed earlier (good). Work-wise, I can get back into a productive routine (good).

This year, my girls are going into ECE/4 and grade 3. Sophia’s last year of preschool is sort of an “eh” year, in the sense that she’s already done two years of part-time preschool, she knows her letters and numbers and is starting to read, and she had to watch all her friends move up to Kindergarten without her. Her birthday is in November, so she missed the cutoff. It’s hard for her right now, but she’ll be fine in the long run. This year isn’t momentous for her, though; she’s comfortable in ECE, she’s known her teacher literally since she was born, and life is good.

Kate is going into third grade. She’s in a combined classroom again with the same teacher she had last year, so she’s also comfortable. I’m glad; last year she was a nervous wreck and couldn’t sleep the night before school started. This year, she’s excited to be in the “big kids” grade.

But. I look at my girls, and the saying that when you’re raising little kids, the days last forever but the years fly by is so poignantly true.

Sometimes I wish I homeschooled. In my head dance visions of classical Lutheran education–Latin, an emphasis on language and rhetoric and dialectical thinking and literature and grammar and…–oh, all those nerdy things an English major and lover of literature would be expected to geek out over.

We would turn my office into a classroom, with work tables for the girls and play space for the boy. We would read together and bake cookies and listen to podcasts and I would supervise their studies and….

…and then I come crashing back to reality, which is

• I am not a good teacher. I myself pick things up intuitively, and am not good at breaking down the steps to anyone under age 16. There’s a reason why Kate, at 8, still can’t tie her own shoes. I can’t seem to show her the steps, because in my head they don’t break down. It’s easier to do it myself.
• My children go to a wonderful school with smart, hardworking, dedicated Christian teachers. The school is their second home; we love it and have no reason not to send them there. For that, I’m grateful: it would be a bit awkward if the pastor’s kids didn’t attend the church school, after all.
• I have to work. I like to work, too, but even if I didn’t like to work, I would have to. Trying to work and homeschool would be a scramble, and if I’m perfectly honest, would likely trigger stress-induced bad behavior from me.

If we were to, say, move to a third-world country where there simply weren’t any appropriate schools, I could probably step up and homeschool, and do a decent job.

But we’re here, we have a great school, and I need to spend the time when the girls are there working.

It’s a win-win.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel a little teary and ambivalent.