Bittersweet

Today I submitted the twins applications to start full time Kindergarten in the fall at the Waldorf school where the older two are already going.
This is what I have always wanted, and why I homeschooled for all those years. I wanted nothing less than a Waldorf education, which I so deeply believe in, for my kids.
And finally, they will all be getting one, and the twins, best of all, will come in on the ground level, and will receive the full benefit of the curriculum.
Not just that, but I will enter a new phase in my life, where my days do not revolve around the needs of little ones. For the first time in twelve years, for the first time since I was twenty-two, I will be free to orient myself in the world. To get a job, write a book, go to school, begin a career.
I should be excited - I am excited, but I'm not just excited. I'm also sad, and full of bittersweet pangs at my first taste of an empty nest. Suddenly, these years which have seemed so long, the days when I thought I would surely go mad, are gone, and my last babies will go off to school, and that will be that. I'm not sure I did a good enough job. Did I read enough stories, play enough games, answer questions patiently enough? I'm certain that I didn't, because I felt I had all the time in the world.
Which is why I think I drove the poor admissions woman crazy, promising to submit their applications, and then not doing it, week after week. She finally threatened me with missing out on space in a full class, and the truth is that I don't want to hold onto my littlest ones like I did the older two, until I couldn't wait to have them busy elsewhere for their days, which is what happened this past fall when we enrolled the older two after all our years of homeschooling. So, I did it.
Today every lasy vestige of babyhood has leaped out at me. Kissing boo-boos, pretending to be dinosaurs, watching out the car windows for mermaids and mermaid castles, and their general freedom to play, draw, and lay around and dream. All these things seem finite and threatened by their imminent institutionalization, even if it is an institution I believe in.
I'm not sure I'm doing the right thing, but just because it's hard, doesn't mean it's not right, and I know I don't want to end up where I did with the older ones, so I am doing it.
And funnily enough, I'm starting to feel pretty grown up myself.