The last day of "summer"...

Friday was the last Friday before the public schools are back in session.  We went to a fun "end of summer" swimming playdate where the majority of people there did NOT know that we were homeschoolers.  As to be expected on this day, the topic of school came up.  There were the multitude of, "Are you guys looking forward to school starting?" (when we've already been going for a couple weeks) and, "Are you glad summer vacation is finally over?" (when we're planning our beach trip for the day everyone else is going back to school) and of course the, "Are you looking forward to a quiet house?" (when that NEVER happens LOL).  These are understandable questions and ones that I probably have even asked of friends in the past.  They seem almost foreign now though!  I thought I would just walk through a few of my answers for these questions and how they have changed since we began homeschooling.

"Are you guys looking forward to school starting?"  Of course!!  We truly love school.  But it's a different love now.  Before homeschooling, Aly loved going to school to see all her friends again, but the idea of doing all the "school stuff" was definitely not loved by her or me!  NOW, as homeschoolers, both girls love doing the school stuff!  You should have seen how excited they were, on the first day of school, when I told them they were going to get to take a pretest for Geography!  Aly voluntarily told me that she wants to take her MATH WORK with her to work on the car on the way to our beach trip.  Okay, really?!?!  Math was her most despised subject before we started homeschooling and now she wants to voluntarily do it on a day I'm giving her completely off??  To be totally honest, I doubt when reality sets in that she'll even crack open the book on our trip, but the point is that she knows she enjoys learning it now!  Who knew?!

"Are you glad summer vacation is finally over?"  Once again, I would answer, "Yes!" to this one, but for different reasons.  Instead of being glad summer vacation is finally over so I finally get the kids out of my hair, now I'm glad summer vacation is over so that we can get back to our routine and dig into our new studies!  So yes, I'm definitely glad summer vacation is over...but not for the same reason as most.  Now the end of our summer vacation marks the beginning of our learning about the creatures that swim in the ocean, and the different cultures that make our world great.  We get to practice new writing skills and learn new math functions.  And we actually enjoy a large portion of it :)

"Are you looking forward to a quiet house?"  Well...yes...but not in the same way.  Don't get me wrong, I love my silence just as much, if not more, than the next mom.  Anyone close to me knows how precious those nap-time hours are to me and knows how I stay up far too late in the evening because of the pure silence it offers me.  The difference for me now is that I appreciate the silence I get even more, because it's not quite as available as it used to be.  It's kind of like that wonderful bag of M&Ms (plain, thank you very much).  I love a bag twice a year at Christmas and Easter and at the occasional movie theater thrown in the middle, but if I were to have a bag every.single.day it would really take the joy out of their sweet melt-in-your-mouth goodness.  I never realized how accustomed I had become to the silence.  It was so much so that the break in the silence (ie all the kids being home) every afternoon and all weekend long was becoming harder and harder to handle.  I see now that we were losing our powerful skills of relating to each other as a household, simply because we were away from each other during more waking hours than we were with each other.  Please don't think this means that I don't still cherish my quiet time because I ABSOLUTELY do.  It's just that it's more of a privilege nowadays, instead of a right.

I never thought (nor still think) my previous answers were wrong, but man how my answers have changed in one short year :).  Bring on this new school year!