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My son, Oliver, asked if he could wear his superhero cape again after a year of it being tucked away in a bin of dress up clothes. I almost burst into tears.

You see, capes aren't allowed in public school - not even if it is some sort of special superhero dress up day - it's too distracting. My five year old, who had been wearing a cape every single day for the past two years, had to put such childish things behind him when we entered him into public Kindergarten last fall. It was not our first, second, or even third choice, but it was the only choice we had at the time. I was finishing my lactation consultant prerequisites and had not even enough time for my own studies, much less the studies of my three young children. And so, we enrolled him, last minute, in our local elementary school located a 5 minute walk away from our house.

The good: he learned how to read, to write, to do simple addition and subtraction, and he made a few friends that stuck up for him when kids were mean. All in all, it was a good school year, and a successful one. He found a love for art that we never knew existed and he was never in trouble.

The bad: he would  meltdown every day after school, fight with his siblings, kick and hit me on the way home from school, and fight homework tooth and nail. I felt like the course work was a bit stringent, and we stopped requiring he do it months before school ended. His teacher and I never really got along. There were words back and forth for months, and she had terrible grammar and spelling. I mean, for a person, not just a teacher.

All of this would have been tolerable,  and we would have just chalked it up to a bad teacher and hoped for better next year, but the kicker was this: Oliver begged to be homeschooled.

So, the adventure begins.