Oh. Hi. I almost forgot to write a post here today. (Well, I did forget, but I remembered an hour or two ago and voila! Here I am!)

I love school supplies. I love buying a bottle of Elmer’s glue for twenty cents and a package of Crayola markers for a buck. I love fresh erasers and bundles of notebooks (ten for a dollar!). I love the promise of cool days and colorful leaves.

So, it’s no surprise that I have an enormous cache of school supplies, hoarded in drawers and cupboards as if they will save me in case of a nuclear attack.

But, my passion for school supplies aside, I’m not all that excited that school starts here on August 31–just over a week from now–because I am a school-at-home mother. Which means that my twin 13-year olds will not be heading off for a full day of education and socialization. No. They’ll be home with me, sitting at the kitchen table with crazy bedhead hair and stinky breath (until I say, “Did you brush your teeth? Go brush your teeth!”). They will give me dirty looks, tell me they are too tired and complain of boredom.

Personally, I love the idea of public school. I love our public schools in particular. I know and admire quite a few of the public school teachers and I count half the school board members as friends. One of my sons, the third grader, is thriving in public school.

However. Our twins went through public school through fifth grade. On the brink of sixth grade, we decided to bring them home for school. One son struggled with academics (he appears to have issues with attention, memory and decoding language) and the other had been “socialized” within an inch of his quirky life. Despite his urgent longing to be included in the gang of boys that dominated the soccer field during recess, he was repeatedly called names, teased and bullied–out of earshot of the teachers, of course.

So, fearing that our academically challenged son would be lost in the increasingly difficult world of middle school and fearing that our socially challenged son would be mocked until he no longer cared about his academic work, we pulled them both out of public school. (They were thrilled and relieved and never want to go back.)

At the very same time, the public school offered “virtual school” at home, through K12.com. We jumped at the opportunity to have the school district provide the curriculum and support to us as we navigated the new world of school at home.

Next week, we’ll begin our third year of school-at-home–which is not to be confused with homeschool. (I won’t speak for homeschoolers as a whole, but some find our association with the public schools to be troublesome as they desire to be free from state accountability.)

As school-at-homers, we float in the limbo on a raft between the island of public school and the island of homeschooling. We depend on the public school for materials and accountability. Yet, we do all of our school at home. I like to think of it as the best of both worlds, a compromise of sorts.

Anyway. How do I prepare?

As I mentioned, I overdose on school supplies. Then I do crazy stuff, stuff that seems imperative to me, like plan a two-week menus, complete with shopping lists so I won’t find myself circling the kitchen every afternoon, wondering what to make for dinner after a long day of encouraging the children to do their work. (And when I say “encouraging” I mean “screaming my head off and threatening to put them back in public school.” Ha ha. Yeah. Just a little joke there.)

I’ve also cleaned out the kitchen cabinets, the filing cabinet holding papers from twenty years ago and purchased a new washer and dryer. You know. Things completely unrelated to school, but in my somewhat freaked-out-how-can-summer-be-ending?-mind, absolutely essential to my mental health.

I just know that through the school year, some things will slide as I focus my attention and emotional energy on getting history, language arts, math, literature, science and (so-help-me-God) even art lessons completed with a minimum of tears and shouting. School-at-home has taught me to prioritize, if nothing else (although I have learned an awful lot about American History that I must have missed in high school).

I have also learned that I can accomplish so much more than I ever dreamed and that the days when my twins were babies, crawling on the floor and demanding everything from me were the easy days. If you’d told me that then, I would have thought you unkind and insane–because didn’t you see how stressful it is to have babies?–but now I know.

Now those babies have attitudes and (gasp!) teenage hormones and quite frankly, they aren’t so cuddly and sweet. The only sure thing about motherhood is that it always changes.

One thing will never change though, and that is the beauty and scent of unused Crayola crayons, which explains why I have six brand new boxes of them (twenty cents a piece!).

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Mel blogs about shrinking at The Amazing Shrinking Mom (halfway to goal!) and about her life at Actual Unretouched Photo.

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