Esther McCarthy: Since when did back to school start in August?

Esther talks about the return of 'The Routine'

Esther McCarthy: When did August become the new September?

Sorry now but emm, when did back to school start happening in August? Was it always this early? I can’t remember last week, never mind last year, but August 26 sounds positively inhumane.

When did August become the new September?

Don’t get me wrong; we are all looking forward to the return of The Routine.

“Won’t it be great now to get back into a bit of a routine,” all the parents nod and agree feverently, forgetting the June trauma when we were all wild eyed and nearly broken from the horror of alarm clocks, school lunch boxes, and €2 pieces for World Cartoon Baloney Day or whatever thing they’d made up to bleed us dry for a new doorknob.

Is the human brain conditioned to go into reset mode every September? Sorry, I mean, August.

Are we just exhausted from a summer of trying to keep them fed, off the screens, and going to bed at a reasonable hour without the threat of an alarm blaring before 7am?

It’s Parenting 101, so why does it feel so hard during the summer? We long for this imagined free-range, sun-drenched childhood, wistfully recalling our own rose-tinted days of shoving a few Corn Flakes into your gob, jumping on the bike, and fluting around the estate looking for a game of rounders or soccer, or hopscotch, or daisy chain making.

We’d come back lunchtime-ish, throw on a bit of toast, rub the dog, give him the crusts, maybe use the toilet, then feck off out again until dinner.

Our parents had it easy, the wasters. Now it’s fresh croissants, or pancakes with crispy bacon (not regular rashers, oh no, what are they, animals?), or French toast with icing sugar demands for breakfast.

Lunch is artisanal sourdough filled with whatever will fit in the airfryer, and dinner... well, let’s just say Uber Eats has added me to their Christmas card list.

Plus parents get the badgering about protein content, carb-loading at exact timings before match kick-off, and I got a lecture about seed oils after the kids watched some dolt on TikTok with tree trunks for arms going on about the evils of sunflower oil.

It’ll be great craic trying to put lunches together now. I wouldn’t mind, but the same boyos worrying about the seed oils, gobble those vile breakfast bars, and I am pretty sure they’re held together by nuclear material and Krazy Glue.

What changed, though? I was counting down the days, the hours, the goddamn minutes till we could blare out S chool’s Out for Summer — our annual Alice Cooper blare fest on the way to school is one of my favourite family traditions, more so now that it mortifies the kids in equal measure to how it used to delight them when they were little.

And now I can’t wait to shunt them all out the door into the fine institutes of learning.

That’s the plan, anyway. That’s what I tell myself in the supermarket queue, uniform list in one hand, credit card bill in the other. (It’s just a grey jumper with a crest on it! Why can I only buy it in this one shop, for this massive price tag??) Ugh, the uniforms. I won’t miss the frantic search for the tie every morning. But… they do look so dashing in them.

And I’m just realising properly, for the eldest, it’s the last year he’ll ever wear one.

With kids, we’re usually focused on the firsts. The first word, the first step, the first day at school.

We can sometimes forget about the lasts. The last time we held them on our hips. The last time they asked for a bedtime story.

Oh my GOD. This will be the last year of lining up the Boo Radleys on my phone and singing “Wake Up It’s a Beautiful Morning” to his hair peeking out of the duvet.

The last year of trying to trick him into believing the own brand Weetabix are the real thing (what are they made of, gold bricks? Why are they so expensive?).

The last year of the five of us having breakfast together at the same time, Monday to Friday, anyway. And it will be the last “first day” photo. You know the one, leaning against the same door, or the same wall, or the same patch of hedge, every September since Junior Infants, getting taller and more mortified in each one, until you’ve got an entire flip book of him growing up in five-second increments.

We spend half our time wishing them out the door and the other half wishing them back, and somewhere in that whiplash, we forget to actually enjoy the bit we’re in right now. Well, I do anyway. I’m going to try to be more mindful of it, starting now.

So, roll on the routine. But please don’t let this year fly by as fast as the summer did.

Because when school’s out next year, at least for one of my babies, it’s not for summer.

It’s for the rest of his life.