My mom took pictures of my sister and me on the first day of school, standing on the back step of our suburban house. All cleaned up and smiling proudly, maybe a little nervously, we stood there together before cutting across the backyards on the way to school. It’s a tradition with a lot of families, and still is, only now the pictures are digital and often on social media before the kids arrive at school.

This year my daughter reminded me that I needed to snap a first day of school photo of myself. September 1 was the official first day of my self-created and self-led program in Scandinavian Studies. 

I sent the photo to my mom, to which I owe my Scandinavian heritage after all, and pulled up the Danish course on Duolingo. My next online language lesson is in Danish. I figure I should train my brain into Danish and away from Swedish and Norwegian. I haven’t met the tutor I selected on the iTalki app yet. I hope she will be as good as the Norwegian and Swedish tutors I’ve already met. 

On the first day of school in Denmark for the youngest children, teachers put out flags and flowers and welcome parents inside for a few celebratory speeches. In Sweden there is an upprop, where elementary students and parents gather together so the teachers can call out the children’s names and take them to their classroom. There the teachers can answer some parent questions and make the children feel at ease as much as possible. This is exactly what our experience was in Switzerland, too, standing with all the other parents, listening for our children’s names. Plus we made sure to take those first day of school photos.

There is no tradition to follow for the first day of a school I made up myself. Perhaps sitting in our quiet house, remembering previous first school days, is as good as anything else. My sister and I smiling into the camera together the one year we were in the same school, New Hope Elementary, she in grade 6, me in kindergarten. My oldest at the pink colored school at the bottom of the village, waiting to be called into class, and then that same young child, not so young anymore, on her way to high school classes at the American school. My youngest on the road below us, cutting through the path by the sports store, where I took a quick photo before there was any chance of running into her middle school classmates walking toward the bus stop, just in case a photo then would have been embarrassing for her. 

So, Paul, today’s the day! There’s no announcements and no new classmates to meet. But there is still the sense of a slow train leaving the station, soon to gather speed, scheduled to arrive May 9, nine months from now, when my family and I sweep into the cafeteria at Ikea for the celebratory graduation dinner of meatballs, potatoes, and lingonberries. It’s on our calendar already. I will have just one part of my program to finish after May 9 – the three-week abroad experience, the one I keep telling my family the international coordinator (also me) insists I have to complete. It’s the capstone experience, after all, of this wonderfully whimsical year of self-study.