It wasn’t long ago that I wrote an entry about how a bunch of unaddressed *stuff* had piled up while I wasn’t paying attention due to an emotional brown-out that had been going on for a while.
Well, I am well on my way to resolving some of it. My office is very nearly clean. The only stuff I have left to do really is some unfinished projects that I’ve been keeping out to finish “someday”. In particular, a small quilt that I was making for Bunny Boy and haven’t made any progress on for two years. Gotta get on that now.
I’ve found shelf space for my new trophies. Yeay!
Also, moved everything out of the TV room and vacuumed, dusted, cleaned, etc…as well as got a start excavating the library.
Oh yeah, and laundry. I’ve almost “finished” the laundry. Ha Ha.
Silly woman, laundry is never finished.
Another thing that is never finished is the paperwork from school.
There’s always another two stacks coming home every day. Mountains of paper. Some of it important, some of it trivial, some of it indecipherable…all of it annoying. Reams and reams of forms that must be filled out with the same information over and over and over again, on different forms, and on forms that the kids lose on the way to school, or on the way home before you ever see it, and that the school loses, and that you swore you never saw in the backpacks, but now it’s late and you have to drive in and deliver it today, or your kid doesn’t get to go on the field trip…
Notices, newsletters, fundraisers, tracts, special project assignments you’re supposed to be aware of and helping keep up with, reading calendars where you are supposed to record, tally up the number of minutes your child reads each month and sign it, as well as the reading chart, where you are supposed to do the same thing and sign it...God forbid that you remember to write down the minutes but forget to sign it. (yeah…right…like I do that…I just pull a number out of my…uh…ear and write it down. Adventure boy does little else but read. I’ll come down and he’s reading, and I don’t know how long he’s been doing it, and neither does he. He reads on the bus to and from school, about an hour to an hour and a half before bed…sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and catch him reading. I can’t keep track.)
I’ve got two kids. I don’t need this sort of aggravation.
Then there is the chart to fill out that says how much practicing they did on their instruments each week.
If I’d realized how much paperwork I was going to be doing as a mom…well…I’d still do it, but at least I would have been prepared.
Anyway, SCORE! I found my copy of the lease agreement for Adventure Boy’s tuba, so I can send that in. Adventure boy has been in band for three weeks, but they wouldn’t give him his music until he brought in the signed lease agreement. I figure, I don’t need a copy of the lease agreement…they can have mine. Easier all around.
The check wasn’t lost. They had the check, but they wouldn’t give him music until he brought in the agreement, and he didn’t tell me until I badgered him about why he was practicing his old stuff from the summer, and not new stuff.
When I sent it in, the check was stapled to the their copy of the Lease Agreement, and they were both in an envelope so that they wouldn’t get separated…so I assume the school lost it.
Grumble. You could think the band teacher could fire off an e-mail and let me know that she needed this paperwork. I thought I’d handled it.
If all of this seems silly and a little petty, it’s because it is. Sorry to unload on you, but it’s like being nibbled to death by ducks.
And guess what I’m going to be doing every other week? I’m going to be going in and helping the teacher enter grades in the computer…because he’s snowed under with paperwork too.
Ya know, if conventional wisdom is true, and our public schools ARE big, flying whirlpools of suck, it’s not the parents fault or the teachers fault…it’s all the endless, depressing, soul-sucking paperwork.
Anyway, solution found, and one more thing to cross off the list! Woo Hoo!