For the past six years, I’ve been a homeschooling mom. Honestly, when I first became a mother, homeschooling was not something I imagined doing! We originally made the leap to homeschool as a pragmatic decision when facing a cross-country move, new school districts, and an exceptionally intelligent kindergartener.

When Archer was in third grade and Felix was about to start school, I found myself considering sending the kids to the classroom for the 2020-2021 school year. You know where this is going – obviously, we all found ourselves living in the middle of a global pandemic. Suddenly I was the “expert” to every other traditionally schooling mom I knew, and we felt so lucky that we weren’t having to deal with e-learning or a return to the classroom in the middle of COVID uncertainty.

Now that we’re slowly emerging from the worst of COVID, instead of having a third grader and a four-year-old, I have a fifth grader and a first grader, and we were starting to feel like school could offer them more than homeschool: extracurriculars, independence, friends, and the confidence that comes from learning with peers. It felt like I wouldn’t be able to give them the education we wanted AND the social and extracurricular opportunities we wanted without compromising one for the others. And, as my kids blossomed and grew older, they just had so much social energy that it felt like I was holding them back by not letting them be in a classroom with other kids their age.

So, we made the decision to start looking for schools for the fall. When we found a school that seemed like the perfect fit for us and did a trial day, one of the teachers suggested that our more introverted child start right away, so they didn’t have to face the adjustment at the beginning of a school year. Of course, the social butterfly child jumped at the opportunity to start school right away! After some consideration, we decided to go for it.

It felt a little anticlimactic to end our homeschooling journey on three weeks notice – I think I always pictured finishing out at the end of a school year and having a little more ceremony and emotional closure around the end of this season. But once we knew this was the school for us, I think it felt a little silly to wait, once we knew there was room for our kids right away. And the kids are doing so well! They’ve already made friends and come home at the end of every day in the best moods. It’s not without hiccups, but we can already tell it was the right move for us. Meanwhile, Millie is enjoying all the extra attention and walks.