It is the smell that really still gets me.

I will never forget how mornings started my first couple years of elementary school. Before the school day officially started, our teacher would sit down at an electronic pencil sharpener and we would get in line. When one of us would advance to the front, she would take the writing utensil we held in our hand and shove it into the pencil sharpener.

After about 10 seconds and a cacophony of high pitch noises, she would hand back a freshly sharpened pencil with a long and sharp lead point.

The machine was revolutionary for the time and the result was on-point, but it was that fresh aroma of wood that suggested, Okay, the school day is about to start…get ready, that I can still remember to this day.

But the start-of-morning pencil sharpening ritual ceased around fourth grade when the introduction of mechanical pencils hit our school. I immediately swapped out my traditional pencil with a Bic .7mm mechanical writing mechanism and never looked back.

The introduction of the mechanical pencil didn’t kill the traditional pencil. My kids use the old school writing utensil every night at the homework table.

That was of course until I was able to use pen. Sorry, there is no doubt about what the superior writing utensil is. I just assume avoid something that can be erased, smears the side of my palm, and breaks easily.

Nowadays, I never use a pencil unless I am helping my kids with homework. And based on all the pencils we have in our junk box, you would think my children must be doing homework every waking hour. Thank goodness it is not actually like that.

Unfortunately, it just so happens that about 80% of our million pencils are unsharpened and the ones that are sharpened somehow need to be re-sharpened. Thus, the same routine plays out each night where our kids need to take one of our cheap, handheld sharpeners to sharpen whatever pencil they feel inclined to use that evening while managing to get pencil shavings all over the place.

Yes, we do have a couple mechanical pencils around. In fact, Sidney, who was a teacher, prefers our kids use them because she thinks they allow Sloan and Beau to write more legibly. I just have to get my son to stop clicking the eraser over and over to create a lead point that is over a foot long before he actually uses it to write (and then proceed to break the said lead point).

Even though Sid says mechanical pencils help kids write better, I usually shove a traditional pencil in Beau’s hand because of his tendency to fool around with the mechanical variety.

Did I mention that I prefer pen over pencil?

However, on this National Pencil Day it was kind of nice to wake up and smell the wood. Don’t Blink.