Back to School

Back to school!

I have a thousand things to do and none of them are getting done, but at least the kids have gone back to school. What a ride. They prepared their own pencil cases this year, and I love it. I love seeing the things they think they will need or don’t, and how come Caleb’s got his pencils tip-up and Naomi’s got hers tip-down and, and which pencils are their favourites, and it’s all such a gift to have children who are so capable and healthy and who have these opportunities that they are so tremendously fortunate to have. My insides are churning and I’m terrified for them and terrified for myself.

I’d been holding off on all these things to do: emails for the shop, projects, photos, blog posts, household errands, appointments to book. I got this letter from the Ministry of Health saying that Naomi is missing a vaccine but her pediatrician says she’s not, and I feel like I’m in some sort of twilight zone of bureaucracy which on the one hand is a riddle to be solved and on the other hand perhaps a place I could lay awhile, where no one will find me or bother me or ask me for snacks immediately before or after dinner. While I moan and groan about, I am indeed slowly chipping away at all these life tasks, even as my life force is slowly draining out of me.

I’ve been decluttering totally unsystematically, and I discovered Caleb had, for some reason, four Chinese textbooks, so I recycled two of them. He only needs one, so, in fact, a spare is already gracious of me. What am I if not a gracious mother? And then he accidentally brought these two textbooks to his first lesson (the textbook and the workbook look similar, although it probably wouldn’t surprise you to know that one actually says “WORKBOOK” and the other says “TEXTBOOK”), and—I kid you not—he lost both of them. And so now he has none, along with a tremendously irrefutable argument to not do his Chinese homework. How did this happen? How did we go from four to none?? The perils of decluttering. There is a life lesson somewhere in here, but I probably recycled it. Jon, single-handedly and heroically shouldering the staggering weight of our recycling (and garbage) bins in this storm of decluttering, is unimpressed. I have not yet bought a fifth textbook, and I’m not sure who is winning in this interim period, but it’s definitely not me.

Junia doesn’t have a pencil case, but she also, coincidentally, went back to preschool. How terrible! Here is a photo of her on her little balance bike, totally focused on that cross body action, with her little granny cardigan and Naomi’s old bike helmet, and those tiny fists clenched on the handlebars. How terrible. It is not! It is wonderful. And terrible, all at the same time.