WORDS BY ME | KATIE Z.

My oldest boy is learning to write. He can’t quite get those tricky w’s, and he writes his sixes backwards.

Right now, he loves homework. I mean not just a little, when he’s sent home with an assignment, it’s like Christmas morning for this kid. He cries if we can’t make it to a school function, and just about jumps through the ceiling with joy for PTO meetings.

Kind of like how mommy gets when she actually gets to visit a real-life, grown-up bar.

He insists on saving every art project, which almost always includes one of his drawings of rainbows, and he teaches his little brothers the songs he learns in music class.

He loves school. It’s his pride and joy.

But I know there will come a day when all of this will end.

Someday he’ll breeze through his w’s without a second thought, and those pesky sixes will eventually straighten out. The happiness of having homework will vanish, and a crabby teenager will emerge. If he ever agrees to come out of his room, that is.

His little brothers will cease to be his music students, and will transform into annoying shadows…or worse yet, his partners in crime.

And the thought of attending a PTO meeting will be more devastating than a zit on school picture day.

I know that someday, a day that will certainly come all too soon, the scribbly rainbow drawings and stick figure renditions of our family will no longer follow him home in his R2D2 backpack.

And I know how very much I’ll miss it.