All of the children started school this week. I really hate the first week of school. Summer is not only a break for the children, but for me as well. Our tight schedule relaxes, I don't have to chase people around to do things they don't want to do, and everyone gets a break. But all summers must come to an end, and ours did this week. Only nine more months until summer again. Sigh.
At the end of school in June, I did a smart thing and prepped everything for the beginning of school this year. I ordered school books, organized notebooks, wrote out schedules, made new grade spreadsheets, printed out workbooks, and arranged school tables. This turned out to be a good move, as we started our school year less than seventy-two hours after returning to Tashkent.
Usually I deal with jet lag reasonably well, helped out significantly by prescription sleeping pills. Brandon will complain of having been up half the night, and I will smugly commiserate, having gotten a full nights' sleep myself. This time, however, was less successful. I can't blame the baby, as she only woke up once or twice the first night. I guess I'll just blame getting older. In a reversal of fortunes, Brandon was the one who blissfully snored away while I tossed and turned all night. I suppose it's payback for my years of smugness. Thankfully we are more than a week back in Tashkent, and the sleepless jet lag nights and even more terrible days are safely in the place for bad memories that includes newborns, young motherhood, moving, and potty training.
At the beginning of last week, however, we were still in the middle of bleary-eyed days filled with thick-limbed creeping around the house under clouds of exhausted despair. If being jet lagged is anything like a bad hangover, I'm perfectly happy to not be a drinker. So instead of full start to school, we had more of a graduated beginning to our academic year.
Kathleen, in her first year of high school (how did that happen???), had already started school two weeks earlier with the collection of online classes I signed her up for. Sophia and Edwin, who have three online classes apiece, also got to try and fit those in around playing with friends and family in Utah. It turns out that the trade-off for outsourcing teaching to someone else is having to stick with their schedule. Sigh.
I hadn't finished a few last administrative things off this summer, so I spent a the first few days of the week arranging those. Then I fell into the time-wasting planning of my eventual dream house (even moms sometimes get distracted and don't want to do their jobs). So I didn't start actually teaching school until Thursday, and not quite all of the school at that. But I did start school, and less a week after we returned home, so I felt like I got a solid high-five for that accomplishment.
Thankfully, each school year's start goes more smoothly than the last one, and, shockingly, this year was almost free of yelling (by me), crying (by the children), or screaming (by everyone). Each year I add a few more improvements to the schedule and tweak things to make everyone's day run more smoothly. Often I will introduce a new program to help keep everyone organized after a few weeks of chaos, but this year I haven't yet found anything that could use improvement. I guess nine years of perfecting my systems has finally paid off.
There was one morning that I finished my work by eleven and I wandered around the nearly silent house looking for random household tasks to fill my time until lunch. It was almost eerie. I'm very happy to be a mother of older children as well as little ones. Life is just so much easier than it was five years ago.
This school year looks to be (hopefully) pretty quiet as we finish up our last year in Tashkent. I'm happy that our last baby has arrived and I won't be pregnant or delivering this year, instead just continuing on with our quiet, regulated lives. And I'm completely okay with that.