School decisions

I've been praying about decisions for the kids' schooling over the next couple of years. I still don't know exactly what we'll do, but here's where I'm leaning:

Lucy, who will be 4 and a half in the fall, would go to preschool 3 days/week. She's been dying to start school.
Nate will homeschool with me for 1st grade.

Wait, did I just say homeschool? That is not me. I'm the mom who has been counting down the days until all my kids are in school. (I love my kids--I really, really do--but I'm also an introvert and crave some daily alone time.)

There are many reasons I'm leaning in this direction. One main factor is cost. Nate's current school had to raise tuition, and we'd also be paying nearly twice as much anyway because he'd switch from half-day kindergarten to full-day school. If we send Lucy to preschool instead (at the place where Nate did his "mainstreamed" preschool), the cost would be about 1/4. Then I could set aside some funds for field trips and homeschool supplies.

If cost were the only factor, then public school would probably be the easy choice for Nate. But the second factor is boredom. Nate comes home telling me the "sight words" they went over in class ("Mom, we learned the new site words 'as' and 'the' this week")--all while he is able to read chapter books on his own. When they do learn something new to him in school (there have been math concepts he didn't know), he loves it. If I can help it, I don't want Nate to believe that learning is boring, slow, with nothing new or exciting. (I initially put "school" in that sentence instead of "learning"--but it's learning that he loves now, and I don't want him to lose that.) All of this isn't meant to say "I have such a smart, smart little snowflake and I don't want inferior schooling to tarnish him!" Not at all. I do want to figure out what's best for him, though. And I also realize that if he homeschools and eventually wants to go back to school, the grade level issue will still be there.

One of the reasons I think I might be able to do this is if Lucy is at preschool. The combination of all 3 children at once is what I feel might put me over the edge of overwhelmedness (is that a word?). Even with Luce in school, I'm still quite apprehensive about homeschooling (the organization required. the decisions about materials. the actual teaching time. the space). But on Lucy's days off from preschool, we could do our field trips or easy school days.

I've been mulling all of this over for a couple of months now, and I feel like God has been nudging me with different encouragements over that time. A friend from church gave a talk at a recent MOPS about changing our mentality about learning and how our kids learn, allowing them to pursue their interests and passions, not bogging them down with what they "should" be learning compared to other kids. Then Nate's school's announcement came about tuition increases.

I'm still unsure. :)