Oh, The Emotional Rollercoaster Of Sending Your Children To School…

Are you sending your children to school for the first time this month? It’s really emotional, isn’t it? As in, feeling-all-the-feelings, emotional-rollercoaster type of emotions. Whichever ones they are.

I spied our school’s new Reception starters in the playground this week, and even that made me feel teary, right off the back of being happy to drop off my happy-to-be-dropped-off older two. The new starters looked so impossibly tiny in their uniforms, surrounded by all the parents.

It’s an often-mentioned and mildly irritating cliche everyone tells you that the days are long but the years are short, But it seems like one minute you’re eternally awake at 5am after a long night of no sleep when everyone cried, including you, trying desperately to think of things to do, the day stretching endlessly ahead of you.

Then the next minute, you’re at the school gate with a sob in your chest, wondering exactly where the past four-and-a-bit years went.

Sending My Last Baby To School

It only seems like only five minutes since it was me dropping off my wasn’t-she-just-born youngest, and trying not to cry, like a baby, until I was on the way home. She was ready! I was ready! She has since completely blossomed from going to school.

It was just really hard. And weird (read about it in my post on what I wish I’d known about my child starting school).

I’m now in the strange position of mentally preparing for sending my eldest off to secondary school, in just two years! I know it will go so quickly. Hold me, I’m not ready. Wasn’t she just born?! (yes). How is she nearly as tall as me?

The Brilliant Things About School

As hard – or as easy – as it can be to take the step though, sending your children to school expands their horizons and fills their heads with multitudes of wonderful things. Like learning to read, which is magical (apart from when it involves them reading your own messages).

And you get to pick them up at the end of the day and it’s kind of like Christmas. Especially when as a mum school gives you the wonderful gift of daytime time. Along with hot tea. Which can be totally transformative. Even a few years on, I find it hard to believe that after so many years of cramming all my work and everything else into the few nursery days we had, along with evenings and weekends, I actually have time now, to do work, and anything else I want to do, during the day (although the 3pm pick-up comes round so quickly).

If I was to offer you one piece of advice about school – apart from it will all be OK! – it would be to always put uniform in the washing machine immediately, as if you leave it in the washing basket it will inevitably still be there on Monday morning. As I have found out, many times.

Hope everyone’s OK.