The Mother Plagiarizer

Please note, this post is completely lifted from the pages of my oldest son's school journal, spelling and grammar mistakes included.  I require that my children write every {school} day.  I was thinking about making the same requirement of myself, but I wondered if writing would become too much of a chore, like dishes and laundry and cooking and sweeping and teaching and running and showering and... I have too many requirements that I'm failing already.  Let's just keep it the way it is.

UPDATE
You know what they say about March. March comes in like a lion a goes out like a lamb. In 21 day ginger will be two and 15 more days until her birthday party. She is going to share it with our cousin, Login, and speaking of Login she is going to be a big sister in July.
I was sick yesterday and the day before that, so I didn't write in you Journal though I'm still not 100% today. More like 95%.

I ask you, what kind of mother makes her son do school work when he's only 95%?  
Login, whose real name is something very close, is indeed going to be a big sister in July. Her mother announced it on her photography blog, so I guess it's alright for WPaul to announce it in his Journal. Yay for cousins!

Mood Swing Much?

Today I played with my kids. 
True story.

19^°F

High

Snow Shower  

Chance of Snow: 50%

It was too cold to send them outdoors for the scheduled 30 minutes of recess/physical education/run-around-screaming-until-you're-worn-out-enough-to-listen-to-your-afternoon-lessons.  I would have felt guilty staying  in the relative warmth of the house while I sent my young'ns in such frigid air, even if they do have a barn for shelter.  Of course, I didn't really want to give up said warmth, relative or not, so I kept them in.

We played tag for 30 minutes.
Yes. We ran in the house.
Yes. I participated.
Yes, I actually enjoyed myself.  In fact, I laughed until I cried just a little. A plus? I grew warm enough to shrug off my cardigan, a nearly unheard of occurrence in this house. It was a pretty intense game of tag, covering all four levels of our house and a rather fluid set of rules.
I felt like one of those fun moms from a different blog.
Then it was time to get back to the serious part of school (i.e., Math).  I was the only one ready to be settle down.
So I yelled at those pesky kids.
I didn't use any bad words, but I certainly displayed my irritation.
Math makes me cold. I had to heat up some coffee and search out my discarded sweater. (Found on a kitchen chair.)
I'm pretty sure moms on other blogs don't follow a truly fun bonding experience with screaming over non-essentials.  Maybe I would have felt less guilty if I'd just let them out in the freezing temperatures.  Maybe.

Maybe I'll make it up to them with some free pie at the bakery. Can National Pie Day rescue my children from my emotional fluctuations?  Does anyone else think that the American Pie Council sounds like a humanitarian aid organization with more calories?

Stay-For-School

So we started our own little home-style school today. I'm calling it Brick House Home Education, for obvious reasons.  Our offspring are officially excused from the public schools, so I am not looking for any truant officers just yet.  I am brewing a second pot of coffee just now, in case anyone reading was concerned about the cohesion of this post.  Maybe cohesion is not the word I want; but until I have more caffeine tainting my blood stream, the brain part of me is not working at its best.  This is great for a teacher, even better for a teacher dealing with the truth of the old adage "Familiarity Breeds Contempt."  Adage, smadage is what I say.  GBaby is familiar with me, and also contemptuous of my sleep needs.

Let's just focus on the good parts of today, ok?  It will help, no doubt, if I use pictures.

After our morning chores were completed and our hairs brushed, we started our school day with a Psalm. I blinked back a tear while I listened to their sweet voices read the ancient prayer. They giggled at the line, "I am a worm and not a man," and we stopped to explain that the writer of the Psalm felt like a worm, not that he actually was a worm.  My heart was gripped with a tiny fragment of truth I'd never considered: "Who cares about worms? No one. Except the One who made them. So even though King David felt like he was a worm and no human cared about him, he could know that God still did. That's why he was praying."

"Dad and I care about worms, Mom. Because they're good for the garden."
That's going to be another fun part of keeping them home; they already know something about everything. [INSERT WRY SMILE HERE.]

After the worms in Scripture discussion, we reviewed our plan books, text books, markers, pencils and everything else we could possibly ask questions about.  Then we did a little first-day-of-school journaling, using an adorable printable I found at Positively Splendid.  We measured and recorded our height and weight (and not one child asked me to get on the scale! Winning!) and stepped outside for the obligatory first day pictures.


Fourth Grade!

Third Grade!



First Grade!

Preschool!



General distraction of cuteness.

These are crazy good pictures, right? With everyone barefoot and squinting into the morning sun you might wonder why I bothered.  We're getting professional pictures taken tonight (yay! for photographers in the family!) and I've got a little surprise for them this afternoon.  So we'll have plenty more pictures today.

After our mini photo shoot, we settled back down with our reading and math books. Just in time for GBaby to melt into emotional chaos.  Just in time for my first disciplinary problem of the day.  Just in time for lunch and the back yard sunshine!  Everyone crated their books up, stashed them neatly in the closet that we cleaned out last night (a terrible terrible choice in timing on my part, worthy of its own crazy post) and called it a half-day. 

It is still summer, see? And I'm just trying to ease into this school year thing.  Plus there is that whole less-than-five-hours-of-sleep-thing I've got going on.

I Think I Am, But Maybe I Am Not

I was beginning to doubt my existence, not to mention my citizenship. It's a long story. About 34 years (I think) long.  But

I do exist. 

A lot of people can testify to this.  There are five little humans roaming about the earth (or this small corner thereof) bearing traces of myself.

I have a birth certificate.
I have a driver's license.
I vote in local, state and federal elections.
I pay taxes.
I do laundry and dishes and wipe bottoms and cook and scream at roosters.
I have friends and acquaintances around our small town, 626 facebook friends across the globe and two parents that read my blog when they can find their glasses.
What has been missing to prove I am?

A Passport.

Back in December of 2011, my husband encouraged me to apply for my passport.  Not being the type to rush into anything that involves paperwork, I waited until December 29, at 4:30 PM, the second-to-the-last possible day of the year in which to apply at a local post office (because you can't do that on Saturdays, apparently).  If you have ever applied for a U.S. Passport, you know that you need to submit a sad and ugly 2"x2" photograph of yourself, and your birth certificate.  What you may not notice is that the fine print  instructs you to provide additional evidence proving your citizenship if your birth certificate was filed more than one year after your live birth.
I was born in 1978, according to my birth certificate dated 1980.
What can I say? My parents weren't big into following the rules back then.
A few weeks after I applied, I received a really nice letter asking for a combination of "early public record created near the time of your birth" such as:

• Hospital Certificate
• Baptismal Certificate
• Early School Record, or
• U.S. Census Record.

I also received a phone call from the Department of State, (way to make your caller id read like you're REALLY important stuff) Detroit Passport Agency (ok, down a few notches in importance, I guess) to help me figure out what sort of records I might find.  Its a good thing they called because there are almost no "public records" created near the time of my birth specifically about me.  I was

• Born at home (no hospital certificate)
• Not baptised as an infant (and when I was, there was no certificate)
• Home schooled (again, no record of my kindergarten in the garage).

So the lady on the phone suggested I get a notarized letter from my mother describing the circumstances of my birth.  And another one from the attending midwife.
Only there was no attending midwife, just my father. [Good catch, Dad!]
My favorite line from my mother's letter: "Due to an oversight on our part, her birth was not recorded until her brother was born in 1980."  I always did like that brother. 
I sent the notarized letter off, but a few weeks later I received another nice phone call.  Apparently they wanted a combination of documents, not just one.  Some suggestions:

• A Life Insurance policy taken out when I was a child
• Newspaper articles announcing my birth
• State registry for home schools
• Notarized letter from older sibling(s) detailing their memories of the event of my birth
• A notarized list of my siblings birth names, birth dates and places of birth.

But my parents didn't really go in for insurance policies.  They just kept us safe by making us recite a list of rules before we went out the back door to play. [The list was by little 1980 brother's fault: No gate. No barn. No pool. No horses. No cows. True story. Separate post, maybe?]  And my parents have never really cared much for announcements in small town newspapers.  And the state registry for home schools?  Back then the State of Indiana did not record the number of children in each home school, nor their names and ages.  However, I was able to get one of my older siblings to write a letter for me.  The best line from that letter? "Not only do I remember walking in my parent's bedroom and seeing my brand new baby sister, but I remember how exciting it was to my four-year-old self that we got to eat pizza!"
Yes, folks, passports are granted based on the evidence supplied by a four-year-old child.
Not really.  The letters and the lists, however notarized they were, proved to be not-quite-enough.  So, for the low, low price of $67.00 and about 6 weeks of my life, I got a copy of the 1980 census record that shows my existence in the household of David Edward Hutchins, that great catcher of babies.  When those records came, I mailed them off in my typical last-chance fashion.

Yesterday, a little more than six months after I applied, my passport came in the mail! Yay!

 I am so glad my parents took part in that census and that they did not have any more oversights concerning me.

I know that the Detroit Passport Agency of the United States Department of State was waiting on that census record to issue my officialness, but that was just formality, I'm sure.  I am confident it was those notarized letters from my crazy family that convinced them I am who I say I am.  Now I just need to convince myself...

I ran across this article in April, and I realized that my start in this world could have been much tougher.  I mean, my parents may not have thought public records were that important in 1978, but at least I didn't have my death certificate filed before my birth certificate.