I turn to my wife. "That's even weirder than I expected."

Other days start with my daughter walking in talking about pink fluffy unicorns dancing on rainbow clouds, or under-the-bed terrors, or, more commonly, poo.

One Wednesday, she wanders in with the wisps of a nightmare about a man taking her owl hand puppet and turning it into a real-life rabbit. That's not such a bad dream, I say. "But I like my hand puppet," she says.

I used to go jogging in the morning and return home after she had risen. Now I stay in bed for the weird things she might say when she totters into the room. Her strange awakenings are just about the favourite part of my day. It's a lovely little silliness we share, before I yell at her to put her school uniform on.

Lately, she's been waking up complaining about having no friends in kindergarten. I'm sure she's fibbing but I worry still. It's something about seeing her in that pressed pinafore, her mess of hair corralled into a ponytail and lugging a backpack as big as a sofa. She bends under the weight of it. A sherpa in shiny black shoes.

"Welcome to the rest of your life," I might have said on that first day, just a fortnight ago, we dumped her on a kindergarten teacher and ran for the door. She'll learn soon enough that life is so many bells ringing and exams and ill-fitting uniforms and squashed jam sandwiches. For now, she's learning to sing about a worm named Wiggly Woo, which is nice.

But I worry that going to school will knock all the weirdness out of her.

There's always home-schooling, of course.

A recent small study found home-schooled students performed "significantly better" in almost all NAPLAN tests than those in mainstream schools – but then, they didn't have me trying to teach them long division.

The number of children taught at home in NSW is ballooning. Perhaps that's partly because of overcrowding in public schools. There are seven kindergarten classes in my youngest daughter's year. Students at her school have staggered lunch breaks, just so there's enough playground to go round. There's barely enough space for bullying. And I worry she will lose herself in the crowd. The sheer volume of little Jacks and Olivias could repopulate the earth when it all goes down.

But not home schooling. Turning your home into a classroom is like sticking a flat-screen TV in the bedroom – it drains all the fun from it.

Nor could I stick with a less structured school environment, not least because of the fees. Sparing children from wearing uniforms and taking tests, filling their tiffin boxes with macrobiotic delights, is delaying the inevitable. At some point, real life is going to slap the smiles from their organic labneh-stuffed faces.

So it's walking up the hill each day to the local public school. And mornings spent getting them in the door before the first bell rings.
I have started jotting down the weird things they say, before they're forgotten in our rush to ready them for life.

My eight-year old once wanted to be a zebra so she could have horse friends and live in flowers. What do you want, I asked. "Happy days and lots of loot," she said.

My four-year-old tells me she wants to wear a snorkel on the toilet.

So much of life is about having to be somewhere else. So I value those small, profitless moments when she comes into my room each morning.

And I fear the day when she starts making sense. She'll walk in murmuring about the weather forecast, property prices or fuel economy. "Dadda, what's the car parking situation like?", she'll ask. And a little part of me will trundle off to die.

Parenting being an inherently selfish venture, I lie in bed thinking about when I was young. And how I learned to like my school uniform. And the day my own dad said I was too old for stuffed toys on my bed. Admittedly, I was 13. But I still think of it now and that must mean something, mustn't it?

You can't keep the world from walking in the room. But for now I will hold tight to my quietly weird and wonderful mornings. To waking up with tales of unicorns and hand puppets, and ball sacks and poo.