For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for September 01, 2015

Wait til they head off to college!

She has post-pack-’em-off depression.

Don’t worry, I’m pretty sure there’s another kiddo in your future!

I remember walking out of my baby’s kindergarten class on the first day of school, crying.

Lynn’s Notes:

I don’t remember missing my kids when they went off to school. They were ready, and the strip, for me, was a full time job. This was Elly’s point of view. This was from someone who would now be wondering where the future would take her. Wanting a career aside from parenting, she was now free to make some choices.

For kids, time takes forever to pass. For adults, it seems like tomorrow is yesterday in the blink of an eye…

El is free until three o’clock, then everything turns back into pumkins and mice lol lol.

When my youngest started school, it was have another baby or get a dog. We enjoyed that dog for 12 years, and the next one after that for 11 years. Then it was on to grandchildren.

Especially today, where local public schools have become nationally controlled government indoctrination centers:

Homeschool (or private school if you can afford it). Just say no to government school.

Elly is a college dropout, not high school. Not going to college does not necessarily limit one’s choices. I am also a college dropout, but I took just enough classes in my chosen field (as Elly has) to be employed successfully for more than 40 years. My husband, too is a college dropout and he’s been an accountant, then a computer programmer for as many years. (He was a programmer when that involved punch cards. Now he works on a Unidata system, and is considered one of the best programmers at his place of business.

Of course most men can be home school advocates, as they don’t tend to be the teachers, but go off to the “real jobs” and wonder out loud what their wives and the mothers of their children DO all day…

We all know that Elly is not a potential homeschool teacher. Most of us are not. I can teach other people’s children, but can not run a school for my own, and everyone I know who has tried has had weak areas (in one case, most areas were weak, but the child smart enough to test through doing almost nothing). With school teachers, the teacher’s weak area will almost always be cleared up by another teacher the following year, but in homeschool, you have to work hard (and allow others to do some of the schooling) to do that.

Firm believer in public schools. Ours are great (admittedly, because we are middle-class, and it’s wrong that we can’t all say this), and I know what we are teaching our kids. If I disagree with an interepretation of history, I can address that, but overall, it’s wonderful that my child hears many perspectives, perhaps especially when we don’t always agree. Then they know what the other people think, who they will have to work with and live with. Not just people like us.

The way your public schools are today, is the way most of your population will be tomorrow. If you want them derided, all the best students taken out, all the remainder regimented and tested every couple days, and to know that the rich don’t have to follow those same rules, well, we’re running into that in the US already…

I love Elly and hope my children-in-school life turns out as well as hers will!

And then in my grandson’s class, there was a little girl that cried every day for her mom, who believed in Tough Love(as long as the teacher had to watch her)

She has a whole new freedom…and no idea what to do with it.

For me I remember when my children was little and full time at school I thought great all this freedom, after while got boring.

Ellie’s facial expressions today are just about perfect, if you ask me. They convey her emotions so well.

Remember that this is from an earlier time when there were still jobs for people without degrees. And for people with degrees, for that matter…