Everybody’s going to love today

First Day Of School. For parents everywhere it’s a great day, and for workfromhome parents…it’s a high holiday, the day that your kids (however charming and delightful they are, and no matter how dedicated to them one may be) get out of your office, where they have been installed for the last two months. Yup, it’s the grand and glorious return to that fantastical device called “a schedule” where you know what everybody is doing when and nobody lies on the chesterfield all day reading a novel and talking on the phone while eating buckets of Cheerios and changing outfits every ten minutes. Sure, packs of teenagers will still descend upon my home like locusts eating everything in their paths, but they’ll do it in a more predictable fashion -strictly after 3:00, and I don’t mind that at all. It’s the free range teenagers who can show up in any numbers at any times that get me down.

You betcha knitters, it’s the return of sanity, the return of a proper quiet workday, and the return of having a slight possibility of getting ahead of the mess – now that they’re leaving six hours a day. The return of essays and homework, of responsibilities greater than putting on sunscreen… the return of clubs and teams and clothing bigger than a tea towel. It’s all sorts of wonderful things (like “Frosh Week” for Megan, who’s starting University) and not being a minor niner any more for Sam, who’s a grade 10 now. (A status that she referred to this morning in a text as being “sick”, which turns out to be excellent, and quite unlike actually being sick.)

It is a day that I celebrate each year with interpretative dance in the kitchen.

It is a good day.