When we first found out we’d be home-schooling the kids we were horrified. It felt like the most monumental undertaking, requiring discipline, organisation, mutual respect and more than a little pressure from the school who would be assigning tasks every week across a range of subjects.
Our foray into home-schooling only began a little under four weeks ago but so much has happened since then - or rather nothing has happened since then - that it feels a lifetime ago.
Add into the mix that the last two weeks have officially been Easter holidays - which has basically granted us a fortnight off the aforementioned discipline, organisation and mutual respect - and the very notion that our children will go back to school with an iota more knowledge than they left with is, frankly, laughable.
But today a brief moment of normality came over proceedings when parents of pre-schoolers and year 6 pupils found out which primary or secondary state school their children had been allocated.
For so many parents this is a hugely nerve-wracking time. Are they in catchment, how many others have applied who live closer, who jumps the queue because they have siblings at the school, is the family sufficiently religious, have they greased the right palms, slept with the right admissions secretary….? (Not really.)
Today the WhatsApp group for parents of Bella’s pre-school class was a flurry of good lucks and nerves as we awaited the 2pm email from the council announcing our child's fate. The nursery is attached to the school so most of the children were hoping to proceed up to the Reception class there, which added an extra element of emotion.
All the online chatter about something unrelated in any way to Coronavirus felt so wonderfully freeing. Aside from the fact I can’t quite let myself believe that the kids will ever go to school again, I found this small glimpse of normal life and planning for the future a strange sensation.
It was as if for a brief moment none of 'this' was happening. We were allowed to dream of a time when our biggest concerns would be which group is meant to be on show and tell (I promise, no one EVER knows), and who has been lumbered with the sodding class teddy for the weekend.
I crave the run of the mill, the drama-free, the routine. I welcome the stress over an incomplete football kit, a misplaced water bottle, a suspiciously empty reading log...
We weren’t too nervous about Bella being allocated a place at our local primary school as we live close and Henry is already there but it was still a nice comfort to think the next seven years are taken care of.
(Although after today's show of creativity from Bella I'm not entirely sure she needs to go to school - I think she could just head straight to Dragon's Den and be away. She retrospectively invented the phone holder. By taping an old cupboard door knob to the back of an old iPhone, then demonstrating how it worked by 'calling' her babysitter, Stacey.)
I still worry that Bella’s precious Reception year will be disrupted by another outbreak of Covid-19 and another lockdown. I need all the memories - the first nativity (Henry was a wise man and I thought I was going to pass out with love for him), the first sports day (before they have any concept of competition or sufficient coordination to jump over a hurdle that’s only six inches off the floor), the mountains of PVA glue-coated sugar paper that will need to syphoned off into the bin after dark... I want all the milestones, all the memory box fodder and all the 'but where has the time gone?!' snivelling at the back of the hall.
I am already troubled every day at the moment that I might have a lifelong gap on the Class Photo Wall Of Shame that I’m creating in the playroom. If school doesn't reconvene next term I’m considering lobbying the headteacher to recall all of 2SB back over the summer holidays to pose for the annual end-of-year photograph.
So today, as we get used to the idea of no less than three more weeks of lockdown (and probably more), I feel momentarily buoyed by the opportunity to look ahead. To think beyond house arrest birthdays, cancelled summer holidays and the very real fear that sooner or later they actually will eat me out of house and home.
Roll on September, we can’t wait to see you. Now there's a sentence I've never said before...
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