Slowly, summer comes to an end

Getting ready to enter our fourth year, I realize that homeschooling has really brought a whole different perspective to our summers. As this summer trickles to an end and I get ready to go back to work July 28th, I'm feeling reflective of how fast time is passing and how much things have changed in our lives over the past few years. I can feel the kid getting older by the second and becoming more independent and more mature. With a side dose of sass for good measure. 

I've been very frank with my readers that we never intended to homeschool. It wasn't even an option on the table when the kid started kindergarten. But heading into our fourth year, I wonder how different life would have been those first few years if we'd been homeschooling all along? I'm grateful for the wonderful teachers he met along his short school journey. I'm even grateful for the total dud that drove us to homeschooling, because she forced us to make a choice and to face the facts that we were simply asking a school system designed for the masses to take on too much of an individual.  I'm also very cognizant of the reality that our experiences shape who we become, and that we may be very different people without those first few years of school under our family's collective belt. 

Nearly every day, someone asks us what the kid will do for high school. I've heard from other homeschooling families that this questioning dies down over time. Perhaps it's our own unique situation, but the closer we get to high school age, the more this comes up, not less. The truth is, that decision day seems as far away as the day we decided to homeschool for "just one year". It's not that I don't think about it, because I do, but I can't come to grips with making that decision right now or even in the somewhat near future. It seems an impossible choice- take the finally happy, finally academically and emotionally satisfied kid and introduce an unknown, or delay the unknown for another four years until college. Is there a middle ground on the unknown that seems both satisfactory and interesting enough to take the risk? If there is, we haven't found it yet.

One week left of summer and I have serious lesson planning to tackle. There are units to be divided, science lab material to purchase and lit units to write (or borrow/copy/edit from my best friend Google). Yet the last week of summer is begging me for a backyard campout, a day at the pool, one last PJ day and cookies to be baked. I know I'm feeling sentimental about it all because the kid is getting bigger and far less interested in my big plans for the week. He'd rather play on the computer, mess around with friends and finish his stack of fun reading. 

Like the lurking high school decision, I'm putting away all those work plans for one more week. I'm going to let this last week of summer just wash over us both, filling us with fresh baked cookies, the smell of sunscreen and one last snuggle on the couch while we watch a movie. We'll figure out the future in August.