And so we have reached the last week of school. I say it every year but that was an unbelievably fast year. My Junior Infant has almost completed his first year in school and taken to it like the proverbial duck. My eldest son is about to go into sixth class and my daughter has finally finished her Junior Cert. It all seems to have gone by in the blink of an eye, except for mid-year project on the Great Famine – that took an interminably long time.
The graduation for the sixth class children is due to take place this week and my friend’s son is one of the boys who will be leaving and getting ready to start a new chapter in his education. She is feeling particularly emotional about it and she doesn’t even suffer from hyper-sentimentality like me! It’s a huge milestone for any child or parent. I expect there will be lots of tears on Tuesday, mostly from the parents I imagine, and some pretty embarrassed pre-teen boys. It will be my son next year. I’m not in any hurry for it to come around.
So now with bleary eyed sentimental reflective rose tinted glasses I am looking forward to the summer holidays. No homework induced battles for nine weeks. No smelly, temporarily undiscovered, lunch leftovers to be scraped off the bottom of schoolbags. No sudden disclosures of urgently required paraphernalia mentioned two minutes before we leave for school. It all sounds like bliss
Roll on Thursday when they finally finish up and our time, for a while, is our own. Watch this space for complaints, from Friday, about how on earth I’m supposed to fill that time and ramblings and rantings about long until they go back!