In just a few weeks, it will begin again -- another school year, started with resolve and determination, expectations of a well-run, smoothly productive operation. It will end some nine months later, slowly and sadly, with dashed expectations, crawling across the finish line with barely enough energy to avoid being carted off in an ambulance. I'm not talking about the children in our family -- our three kids still in high school all do pretty well, with a minimum of effort. I'm talking about the parents.

Many Americans take it for granted that the New Year starts on Jan. 1. It's the time we all reorganize, weed out and strategize so that next year doesn't stink as badly as last year did. But for those of us who are parents, the real New Year starts in late August when the kids return to school.

Around our house, we start in mid-August with the resolutions. We're determined: This year, we'll make sure that our children get up with plenty of time to get properly dressed, eat a good breakfast and head out the door for a leisurely walk to the school bus. We're going to encourage our kids to bring healthy lunches to school rather than eat the stuff that only slightly resembles food they slap on the trays there. We're going to make sure that the kids have clean, organized rooms, with well-lighted desks where they can sit quietly and do their homework. Kids are going to have their homework done, in fact, well before bedtime.

Some of the resolutions last a day or two. The first day of school, my wife and I get up extra early, and she makes pancakes for the kids. We're waiting downstairs like servants as the kids tumble down the steps in new school clothes, their just-bought sneakers squeaking down the steps. We see them off with a wave at the door like Ozzie and Harriet.

By day three, everybody's tired of pancakes, there's not enough time, and they opt for a piece of toast or maybe a Pop-Tart. By the end of the first week, we're back to the normal routine where weary-eyed children stumble down with four minutes till blast-off, grumble that they don't want anything to eat, we warn them that a good breakfast is the key to a good day of learning, and they slam the door on the way out.

Lunches follow much the same pattern. Before the first day back, we buy lunchmeats, breads, cheeses, and little school-sized bags of chips and applesauce. We even buy individually wrapped desserts so the kids will have that little warm spark of appreciation when they look in the bottom of their lunch bags and see that Mom and Dad thought of them. (In reality, as with the pancakes, it's just Mom who thought of them, but I will ride coattails where I can.)

The bring-your-own-lunch resolution lasts a week at most. Lunches have to be made either the night before, which involves too much planning, or that morning, something that's tough to do as grumpy, bed-haired kids stumble past, three minutes late for the bus.

The clean, well-lighted place for doing homework is the most frustrating. We've seen all the experts on TV saying that your child needs an organized, quiet spot for homework, so we provide each kid with a desk, a nice chair and a desk lamp. They never get used. Most homework is done on the bus ride home, scrawled on wrinkled paper, with illegible squiggles when the bus driver hits a bump. When homework is done at home, it's either at the dining room table, pushing aside the day's mail and everything else that collects there, or it's done on the living room couch, in spurts and stops, while the TV blares out canned laughter from a 'tween cable sitcom starring wholesome little stars who are about to prove to be not so wholesome.

The best solution, of course, would be to avoid making any resolutions this year. We'd save all that effort cleaning out kids' rooms, making sure their soon-to-be-ignored "work spaces" were ready to go. And, I wouldn't have to choke down dozens of leftover snack-sized applesauce containers. The first day of school, we'd all get up late, the kids would bang out the front door at the last second, in last year's clothes, trailing scraps of half-finished homework. My wife and I could shout out some vague warning about missed breakfast and then go back to reading the paper.

We'd stop, though, clink our coffee cups, and wish each other a pathetic but realistic "Happy New Year."

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