As we enter this, our seventh year with children in Naperville schools, I’ve learned there’s only one day on the school calendar to rival the excitement that kids feel on the last day of school: that felt by parents on the first day of school.
Oh, sure, I remember the pangs of sending our oldest off to his first day of kindergarten on the bus, wondering if they’d bring him back home safely (they did). We felt similarly when our only daughter went off to her first day of kindergarten two years later and our youngest child to his two years after that. Then there was the melancholy feeling my wife and I shared at the end of last school year upon realizing that was the last time all three of our children would ever ride the same bus together. Tear.
And now …
Now any tears would be tears of joy as Wednesday’s first day of school for District 203 students mercifully takes our children off of our couch and puts them back in the classroom. That feeling comes one day later for parents in District 204. The general lament that summer was flying by too quickly is now firmly replaced by relief that routine is about to return.
As these words are being written, our little scholars are firmly nestled in their beds, deeply ensconced in a “dry-run” night of going to bed earlier as preparation for waking up earlier in the morning, which they think we mandated as practice sleep to make sure they know how to do it right. More to the point, it was just a bonus night of knowing the kids were once again back to being in bed before 10 p.m., my wife and I no longer held captive by “SpongeBob SquarePants” or some such program.
This being Sporto’s first year of middle school, he has to board his bus a full half-hour earlier than he did for grade school. He’s been setting his alarm this week to get ready, waking up before anyone else in the house and nearly four hours earlier than he had been much of the summer. Remember those carefree days of sleeping until 10 a.m., just because you could?
The boy promises to pack his own lunch the night before school each day and make his own breakfast when he awakes, not because his parents won’t do it for him. Quite the contrary. Rather, because this is a time for him to be taking on additional responsibility and learning to do more for himself.
Then there was the phone – the promise kept that Sporto could have one by the time he started middle school. The first day of August brought the realization that with school just a few weeks away, I wouldn’t be able to put that one off much longer. That phone now somehow having become an additional appendage for the boy, data usage will never be the same in our house again. Thank goodness for Wi-Fi.
The princess is entering fourth grade, no longer playing second chair to the oldest for grade school supremacy in our family. And though they fight at home like cats and dogs, she and her little brother will no doubt look after one another on the bus and at school without their big brother around.
And then there’s the little guy, who lost so many teeth this summer that his school lunches may have to be pureed. Not to mention, he somehow managed to get sick in the two weeks preceding the start of school, as if he’d forgotten that school is where you’re supposed to go to incubate and mutate the viruses that will infect our homes for the next nine months.
We’ve done our school shopping for the backpacks and shoes and clothes and such, the trappings of the first day that will so quickly become the drudgery of the second. Remember how excited you were to have your school supplies packed, your pencils sharpened, your shiny new Trapper Keeper armed to accept assignment after assignment? The sixth-grade, fourth-grade and second-grade backpacks in our house have been readied for days in similar anticipation.
That can only mean that another busy summer of baseball games and camping trips, Beach days and summer camps has come to an end. Some items were marked off the bucket list, some weren’t, some destined to the unfortunate realization that however well-intentioned, you just can’t fit everything into a scant 11 weeks.
My wife and I figured out that this fall, we know at least one child in our neighborhood entering every grade level in District 203, kindergarten through senior year. It was a novelty game at first – who’s going into third, who’s going to be a freshman? And then it hit us just how fast the time flies.
The boy three doors down, a toddler when we bought our house, is now a senior at Naperville North, and his little sister is a junior. The neighbor boys across the street and at the end of the block, babies just yesterday, are starting kindergarten today.
Sure, summer flew by and we’re relieved to have our kids back in school, but this summer all too quickly becomes next. This school year eventually brings graduation.
More Top Picks Best Travel Mugs
We learned long ago not to wish time away – you can never get it back. That quiet you may relish with the kids back in school will one day be the deafening silence left by adults who’ve flown the nest.
But that first day is awfully nice.
Twitter: @RobManker
Rob Manker is a freelance writer who lives, works and parents in Naperville.