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.