Never Boring

I'll spare y'all the angst I've already spewed about our decision to enroll Thing 2 in an online school this year - you've probably already read it and I am much too lazy to write it all out again.

(Don't you just love *y'all*?  It's the best thing to come out of the South aside from fried chicken!)

So guess what?  We're putting Thing 2 back into "regular" school.

Why?  Oh alright, I guess I should justify this decision for the grandparents so they don't think I'm shirking my responsibility to educate their grandson to the best of my ability.

He. Is. Bored. Stiff.

It is taking him approximately three nanoseconds to get through the curriculum, leaving him the entire rest of the day to fart around doing nothing productive other than helping out Grandmother and playing with the dog.  He's not officially allowed any screen time on school days but I'm 99% sure that rule is out the window on the days that I am in class and not at home to monitor his activities, which is every non-school day of the week.  He's so bored that he has ASKED to go back to school because he misses the other kids.  (If you know him you will realize what a huge change this is from last year and if you don't know him you will have to take my word for it.)

And as much as I would like to do the homeschooling Mom thing and get into all the extra activities and groups that I know are out there, I cannot do that while I am in school myself.  Not finishing my college degree now is not an option either.  Husband is working himself into an early grave and when I finish school and go to work, he will be able to ramp down his business and pursue his own dreams and aspirations.  As nice as it would be to be supermom, husband's health and well-being has got to come first.  Especially when there are other options, good ones, out there for Thing 2.

So we have explored many ideas, including private schools, and decided that the best place for Thing 2 is back in our local school district but in a different middle school than he attended last year and different than the one that Thing 1 still attends.  It is a larger school and therefore has more programs and electives that will keep him challenged, he can move ahead into Algebra and there are lots of other very bright but "quirky" (such a nice way of saying weird!) kids that I think will be a great peer group for him.  It is a school that daughter attended for 2 years so I have a relationship with the principal and many of the staff and regardless of what anyone tells you, that makes a difference.  Husband and I have always been super involved in the kids schools, with parent groups and volunteered in classrooms.  The principal not only is welcoming of Thing 2 coming into her school, she and the rest of the staff are eager to have us as parents back and I know that will help Thing 2 in the transition.

This will also give him an opportunity to develop relationships on his own rather than as part of a unit of ThingOneandThingTwo.  It was interesting that when we talked with the boys about the different options, one of which was for Thing 2 to return to the same middle school as an 8th grader (the test scores confirmed what we already know, the kid is scary-smart), Thing 1 totally freaked out.  He likes being just Thing 1 too and doesn't want to go back to being part of the twin unit that they have always been, even though he didn't have any visible problems when they were together.

I've started the process of re-registering him in our district and getting the intra-district waiver formed signed and he should start after Veteran's Day which is the beginning of a new grading period.

Sometimes I wish that Moses would come down the mountain (Mt. Rainier? Mt. St. Helens?) and give me a stone tablet with the "right" decision engraved on it so I would know and not have to give myself an ulcer worrying about what is best for my kids.  Husband is very pragmatic and says "if it's right, it'll work out, if not, we'll go from there.  No sense in stressing out over it."  I, on the other hand, am having a hard time not pulling my fucking hair out over this.  The decisions you have to make when they're teenagers make the whole breast vs. bottle decision controversy pale in significance.

It's ok to have wine with my lunch, right?