I was done with school long before the year ended.
The early-morning schedule gets old by week #2, because boys like to sleep until at least 8 (unless it’s the weekend, and then they’re up at 5:30), and school starts at 7:45 a.m., and that tardy bell rings strong and fierce, and even though it’s only three who must be there on time, all the others have to get up, too, because the three make enough tornado noise trying to find a backpack he’s sitting on (if you’re the 5-year-old), complaining about what’s for breakfast (if you’re the 7-year-old), and bemoaning the fact that he has no more sweat pants that are clean (if you’re the 9-year-old) that everybody wakes right along with them.
The homework gets old by week #4, because what 7-year-old remembers that he has some math worksheets he has to do when there are LEGOs in the house, and who can even concentrate on reading a passage and answering some silly questions about it when your brothers keep running through the kitchen screeching like spider monkeys dressed in Robin Hood costumes or when they keep exclaiming over the cool fort they constructed from a box or they are, heaven forbid, reading aloud from a book?
Homework at 7 is like adding another line on a parent’s to-do list: Keep boy on task even though he’s used up his on-task capabilities in the seven hours he was at school today.
Believe me, my to-do list was massive enough already without this extra line. I mean, someone has to sit on the couch and read a book every now and then, and it might as well be me.
We were done with all the on-grade reader books by about week #12. All my boys are fantastic readers who read whatever they want all the time here at home. They read Pokemon graphic novels and Bill Watterson comics and the newest Elephant & Piggie books. Which is why we stopped signing those log-their-reading folders right around the beginning of December. It looks like none of them have picked up a book since Dec. 3. They have. I promise. I just can’t always find a pen. Or remember which one read what. Or find the actual folders, because boys are so good at putting things where they belong. The chances of all three of those happening at the same time are very, very rare.
AND THEN THE PAPERS.
So many papers.
There are advertisements for sports camps and karate programs and dance lessons all throughout the year. There are all the worksheets a first-grader and kindergartener and third grader do. There are amazing works of art they paint and draw and color that come home from his art class. There are essays and teacher notes and lunch charge reminders that we owe the school some money.
We did fairly well with all those papers for about the first twenty-four weeks of school. I was actually pretty proud we lasted that long. We had a system: sort them, store them or toss them in the recycling. “Store them” ended up breaking down a bit, because I’d start putting the whole stack of papers in the “store them” pile so I could “look at them later,” except later never really came back around.
And when February swept in, we just stopped caring.
I don’t even know if it was a gradual not-caring or an all-at-once not-caring, but now those papers sit on the bottom shelf of our coffee table or on the library shelves covering up the spines of books or between the beds in the twins’ room (they thought paper might work for insulation and smuggled some in their room without our noticing. The papers are now tiny, tiny little pieces that will have to be hand-picked from the carpet because our vacuum cleaner sucks but doesn’t really. Thanks for the gift guys. I now feel like setting the house on fire.).
The paper hills have become paper mountains. Soon, we’ll be able to repair all the things that are wrong about our house with paper. Hole in the wall? Cover it with paper. Fan is missing a blade? Construct one out of paper. No more toilet paper? WE HAVE PLENTY OF PAPER!
The end of the school year is a bittersweet time, because it holds the sadness of a school year ending and a child getting older, or at least seeming to get older, and the (mostly unspoken) fear of having said child home ALL HOURS OF ALL THE DAYS ALL SUMMER.
But when I weigh the sad and the afraid and the glad, I think I am mostly glad, because the be-an-involved-school-parent pressure and the papers will stay far, far away. Mostly I’m glad because my sons are brilliant and funny and delightful, and I’m going to enjoy their around-all-day presence for all of 2.3 hours on the first day.
Today is the last day of school, the last day we get up early, the day books will no longer come home and homework will stay in a classroom for next year. Which means tomorrow boys will sleep late and they will play together well, because they missed each other so much, and they will spend quiet time in their alone places so I don’t even have to remind them to get “back where you’re supposed to be.”
Well, you know, a mom can always hope.
