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Today was Alex's first day of school and one of the main reasons we picked this school was in the hope of getting him around the local public school district age cutoff.  He misses the cutoff by roughly a month and we've always thought it would be in his best interest to go to school early, rather than late.  It seems every single time I mention our goal of getting him into first grade as a five-but-almost-six-year-old, people scoff and explain to me how boys need an extra year to develop their social skills.

Here are my main reasons why this is so important to me (and it's not just so I can brag!):

1. Getting good grades was exceptionally easy for me.  In fact, I learned from an early age that if I did even just the barest minimum of school work, I could easily get A's and B's in every subject.  Ergo, from an early age, I learned I never really had to try that hard.  School came too easily for me.  My parents, obviously happy with my good grades and satisfied teachers, never laid an ounce of pressure on me to do better or to give 100% of my effort.  I often wonder what would've become of me, academically, if I'd learned to work at my full potential, instead of always getting an easy A.   Even in college, I got good grades relying solely on my sparkling personality and the seat of my pants.

This is literally the only thing I can think of that my parents did wrong when I was a child.  They underestimated my academic potential and were too laid back about education.  I vowed long before having children of my own that I would never settle for anything less than 100% effort.  I want my children to work hard and be excellent, not average.

2.  I grew up in the shadow of an extremely bright and outgoing older brother.  Dan was so smart (reading the newspaper in kindergarten) that he was incredibly bored at school.  Unlike me, he lacked that goody-two-shoes nature and became a slacker and a huge behavioral problem for my parents - a problem that eventually landed him in boarding school, which he then got kicked out of.  Dan never graduated from high school.  Instead, he dropped out, got his GED and went to junior college, which is pretty sad for someone as obviously intelligent as Dan is. 

To this day, my mother will tell you that the biggest mistake she ever made was not keeping Dan in private school after Kindergarten.  In public schools, he was too smart for his own good and was NEVER ever challenged, which led directly to his getting into mischief. 

Guess which family member Alex most accurately resembles?  Go on, guess.

There are many other reasons, ranging from a general feeling that public education doesn't have the resources to focus on exceptional children to the fact that Alex is pretty darn socially adept, but the main reasons are simple: wanting him to be challenged, not wanting his boredom to become a behavioral issue down the road.  Of course, we are VERY open to the idea that he might not be ready when the time comes for him to start first grade, but we'd like to at least be able to make an education decision about it when the time comes instead of just relying on the date that the public schools have selected.  There's just so much more to my boy than his birth date.