Some School Years are Like That

By my count I am finishing twenty years of homeschooling. This gives me some sort of perspective point (though I am not sure how meaningful it is). 

At the beginning of the year I bought a pack of sticky stars to mark our schooldays on the calendar. Sticky stars have motivated me ever since I was in first grade so I thought how cheerful a calendar full of stars would look. 

This is how school looks at the beginning of the year, all shiny and perfect, with everything in a row.

And now last week I looked at the sheet of stars being used. It turned out the pack that was so shiny and perfect was NOT. The machine had only cut around 3 points of them and so points tear off when you try to get them off the sheet. I am too cheap to buy a new pack when I have several hundred still unused and too obsessive to put torn stars on my calendar, so using them proved to be something of challenge. Which is so often just how the whole of life goes.

This is how school looks at the end of a year. 

And after twenty years, what I know is, that's OK.

Firsts and Lasts

Tonight while I was doing the dishes a moth was beating against the window, trying to get into the kitchen. I realized it is the first moth I've seen this season and started to wonder when I saw the last one in the fall.

But that is a crazy thing. Almost always, you only know something is the last in hindsight. That last moth of fall did not flash its wings to show me their delicacy in any special way that caught my attention so that I noticed they really are rather pretty despite not being as splashy as butterflies. I did not even look twice and have no memory of the last one I saw. Today I realize that was a loss.

I suppose if you KNOW something is the last it is a sad or bittersweet feeling. But there is one last I think I wish I knew when it would come.... I always think it would be a happy thing to know that a visit to the dentist was the last one I would have to make. Perhaps I would be sad about even that, though. It is a wonderful world God has given us.