Every School Year Is The Same

The first day of school is such an exciting event – the children are happy to go and see their friends and eager to meet their new teachers, school clothes have been bought and the day has finally arrived when the children who have been waiting with great patience finally get to wear them. Their mother and I hold hands with each other as the children skip merrily along their way to school, each with a new backpack filled with binders, pencils and erasers. The sun is shining, birds are singing, and the smell of hope is in the air and you can just see the joy in their eyes as they embark on the brand new journey that is another year of education.

If you believe anything we have ever done in this family resembles something that organized and peaceful, you obviously haven’t been paying attention. Here’s the way it really went last year:

The night before the first day of school we end up scrambling to purchase one new outfit for each child so they can at least show up the first day in new clothes. Why didn’t we go shopping before? Possibly it was because we are lazy morons, but also possibly due to the fact that we were short on money and time until that moment (and we probably still had neither the time nor the money to get the job done). After the kids were in bed, I sneak back out to find school supplies, but because most other families in the state were more organized than I was, the supplies are sold out – Staples looks like it has been looted in a riot. The only thing left in the store are six other disorganized parents and a box of pink typing paper. I kick one of the other parents out of the way and purchase the typing paper – it will have to do for now.

Even though we planned to get up and get ready over an hour before school starts, we managed to get out of bed with 30 minutes left, which means we must START DOING THINGS AT FULL SPEED AND FULL VOLUME SO THAT EVERYONE WILL KNOW I AM SERIOUS AND THERE ARE ONLY FIVE MINUTES LEFT HURRY UP AND EAT YOR LUCKY CHARMS! Once breakfast was over and the teeth had, ostensibly, been brushed (that is, if teeth can be brushed in the five seconds they were in the bathroom claiming to have brushed them – never mind, they’re mostly just baby teeth anyway), we rush out the door, run half way to school, realize that two kids have forgotten their backpacks, another has forgotten to pack snack and another feels like he is going to throw up.

Note: Whenever we have mass confusion at the house or anywhere else, the children find it helpful to either throw up or threaten to throw up. If they can’t muster a vomit, it is completely acceptable for the dog or cat to vomit as an alternative.

We neared the playground as the bell rings and made it to the lines just as they are filing inside. Because the first day of school is always special, I snapped a photograph of the back of their heads as they went into the building. Then I went and sat down, exhausted, and rejoiced at the fact that I now had six hours alone. I’ll tell you how I screwed that up in just a minute.

Note: Perhaps you are thinking that it is a shame that I was only able to capture the back of the children’s heads in the photograph, but you’d be wrong – it doesn’t matter what the photograph actually looks like because no one will ever see the finished product, anyway. What happens is this roll of film stays in the camera for about a year, then when it is finally finished it gets thrown into the bin on top of my dresser with the other 90 rolls of 35mm film which have been there since the beginning of time. I suspect that if someone were to develop those rolls of film there may be photographs of actual dinosaurs on there – that’s how old some of that film is, I tell you. The point is not to get the picture and look at it, the point is to take the picture and know that I’ve taken it. I think.

Because I had six hours each day, I decided to take a job painting a friend’s house. Which made no sense at all. I’d decided to go back to school, try to keep up with the housework and be home in time to pick up the children each day, so I added painting a house on top of all that? What can I say – I don’t learn well from my mistakes.

As if that were not enough of a drain on my time, the kids all came home from school with the dreaded “information cards.” Let me explain these little things to you with a metaphor. If I you were to read a book that was equal in length to the amount of time it takes to fill the forms out relative to the amount of time I have available to fill them out, you would need to read Don Quixote and the bible during a commercial break while watching Friends.

Each child in school (and there were four of them remember) had three of the little forms to fill out. All three forms are exactly the same. Why did I need to complete the forms in triplicate? Why wouldn’t one form be good enough for all the children? Why did I have to fill out the forms again every year – couldn’t they have just verified the info from the year before? Why was the system not computerized? If not computerized, could they not at least have been on carbon paper? Are our schools so backwards that we have not yet reached the same level of technology as people in 1806?

I never got an answer to these questions. I never had time to ask these questions. I was far too busy filling out these forms on 3x5 paper. Each form had a lot of questions – I didn’t count, but if I had to guess I would say it was in the neighborhood of 11,000 questions. In triplicate. For four kids. Many of the questions were simple, such as the child’s name, and my name and pi calculated to the 23rd decimal (3.14159265358979323846264, in case you are wondering). But as I went along, the questions got a little harder. At least, they got harder for me.

Race (check only one): White/African-American/Hispanic (not black)/Asian/Native American

Now, in case I failed to mention it, or haven’t otherwise made it perfectly clear, we have race issues in our family. I don’t mean we have a race problem – we haven’t had riots in almost a year – but race is an issue we have to deal with. The Duchess, Edward and Lady McBeth are all Puerto Rican and, as such, have dark skin and curly hair. To look at Edward, you might assume he is Hispanic, particularly if you are Hispanic and are hip to the subtle differences, but the majority of white people would just call him black. Duchess and Lady even more so because their facial features are even more African in nature. Which makes sense, since black Puerto Ricans are largely descended of people from the Congo. They also have much influence from the Taino population which was native to Puerto Rico prior to Columbus. In truth, there is also a heavy dose of white European ancestry as well. Due to the conditions the natives and slaves endured in the 16th and 17th centuries, Puerto Ricans are a heavily mixed ethnic group, as well as a very confused group (it is almost impossible to accurately track lineage). Essentially, to be Puerto Rican means to be part native, part African and part European.

So what the hell do I check off on the little cards?

In reality, this is not what ran through my mind when I was filling out the forms. My first thought was that I would need to have at least one beer while I was filling out forms. My second thought was that it would probably require two or three. But my third thought was that this was a bullshit way to phrase the question.

Hispanic, not black? What the hell? They are Hispanic and black. And Native American, too, although the Native American is not recognized by the federal government (like the Inuits in Alaska – also not recognized as “Native American.” Funny, I don’t think they got here after us). And the Hispanic is Spanish, therefore, white. Why can’t I chose more than one? This doesn’t even make any sense. This little form was beginning to piss me off.

In the end, I chose “African-American” because that is how they will be perceived by most people who meet them. Still, I couldn’t help but feel I was betraying some of their heritage by not choosing “Hispanic.” I crossed it out and thought some more.

Having an interracial family presents some challenges, sure, but it also provides some entertainment. For example, the Duchess was playing basketball last year at the Boys and Girls club. She and Stacy were sitting on the sidelines waiting for her group to start as the previous group was finishing up. Apparently there were a few African American families there, which stands out a bit because Arlington is a fairly white suburb. Duchess picked up on this and said, “There’s a lot of brown people here.” Stacy agreed and nothing more is said for a few minutes, then Stacy asked Duchess if it bothered her to have a white mother. Duchess laughed and said, “Does it bother you to have a brown kid?” It’s so nice to hear little kids talk about race because to them it’s all simply about what someone looks like – there are no culture differences, there is no history, there is no racism. If only there were some way to keep them in that state of innocence.

With race, that’s just the beginning. I like to refer to our family as interracial, because, duh, that’s what it is – it covers more than one race. Intertwined. Intermixed. Interracial. I’ll also accept multiracial because, duh, that’s what it is – more than one race. However, a leading adoption publication, Adoptive Families, refers to it much of the time, if not all the time, as “trans-racial.” How can a family be trans-racial? First of all, using the prefix “trans” seems to imply that we are somehow crossing over race, which doesn’t actually work for me, but I can’t quite put my finger on why. I suppose it does, technically, work in our situation. But then I started looking up the terms and I found that most of the time (in the world according to Google) when people are referring to “transracial” they mean adoption, when they say “multiracial” they mean individual people who consider themselves to be of more than one race and when people say “interracial” they are talking about couples of more than one race.

Crap. Now I have to figure out whether I am going to change the way I describe our family or if I want to walk around worrying I am offending people if I continue to refer to us as interracial. Why didn’t someone give me a book on this, for crying out loud? There’s no manual, no answer key – I’m out here winging it. I even took a race class at night to try to get some answers. Unfortunately, it just opened up even more questions. Is ethnicity the same as race? What defines a race? What defines an ethnicity? What about people who have mixed heritage? How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck had a black mother and a Spanish father?

I know that this isn’t necessarily the school’s fault – they have to answer to the state and federal governments with the answers to how many black children are in the school and how many white children, etc. And I know that the government is reflecting the general American attitude that things must be one or the other, black or white, on or off, right or wrong. American’s, for whatever reason, hate to recognize anything that might be a shade of gray. It’s everywhere – look around if you don’t believe me.

When a politician fails to adhere strictly to his party’s policies and occasionally votes with the opposition party, what do they call him? He gets labeled a fence rider or middle of the road. And it ain’t no compliment. Never mind the fact that it probably means he actually thinks about each issue individually instead of toes some ridiculous party line that he doesn’t happen to agree with. We like our politicians to be easily categorized – liberal or conservative.

And we like our people to be either black, white, Hispanic, Asian or Native American. Choose only one. Don’t choose two, because it’s absolutely ridiculous that someone is going to claim to be black and Hispanic. Or Hispanic and white. That’s just crazy.

I decide that I am taking this race question way too seriously and I just pencil in what they call themselves: brown. Which is entirely more accurate than any choices already on the form.

The rest of the forms are fairly standard – stupid questions that have absolutely no basis in reality. For instance, they want my health insurance policy number and our pediatrician’s name, address and phone number. Which makes no sense.

First of all, this information is perfectly useless in an emergency. If my child has such an emergency that he has to be rushed to the ER and neither my wife or myself are available, it’s not as if the school is going to fill out the insurance forms for me – those will be waiting when I get there. Nor are they going to call the pediatrician for any reason at all – what are they going to do, make an appointment for a physical for the kid? Medical emergencies are going to require one of two courses of action for the school officials: 1) call me or Stacy and have us come and get the kid or 2) take the kid to the ER because it is a genuine emergency and Stacy and I can’t be reached. Neither scenario requires a pediatrician’s phone number and address nor the insurance info.

I grudgingly filled it out. Three times. For each child.

Then I came to the section where I am supposed to list who to contact in case of emergency – they demanded three local names and numbers (“you must provide three names” or something like that). Hell, I didn’t know three people I wanted to list there – I didn’t even know one person I wanted to list there. I had only moved there the year before and, quite frankly, we haven’t made a lot of friends I would trust with that kind of responsibility. So, I left it blank. Screw those bastards for rubbing it in my face that I don’t have any friends.

Next was the Scary Section: Is there anyone your child is NOT to be released to?

Um, yeah – everyone who is not me or my wife. Is that specific enough? But, in reality, I had to list the children’s birth mother – not that I was all the worried about her getting motivated enough to come and get them. After all, she couldn’t be bothered to look after them when they were living in the same house and she couldn’t be bothered to visit when they were in foster care with her cousin in the same area of town. Hell, the odds of her actually getting on a bus, researching and tracking us down would be almost a million to one. Still, I wanted to be sure that school never even considered letting them go with her, so I put her name and all her aliases on the list and then wrote “DO NOT RELEASE TO BIRTH MOTHER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.”

Then I felt kind of bad for Mab and Achilles because they didn’t have anyone in their “Do not release to” sections, so I wrote in, “George Bush, Dick Cheney and Carl Rove.” It made me feel a little safer to know that even though I hadn’t listed all the bad guys in the country, some of the most unsavory were eliminated.

Finally, the forms ended with a riddle and three more math questions, all of which I ignored. By this time the sun was ready to rise again and the second day of school was about to begin. It was comforting to know that I had completed these forms and wouldn’t need to fill them out again for another year.

That comfort, of course, lasted approximately six hours as each child returned home that evening with the dreaded fundraiser information. Fundraisers – a subject we’ll get into as soon as I catch up on some sleep.



Fundraisers, or, One More Reason Coworkers Hate Parents

I don’t blame co-workers for haring parents. If there is anything less interesting than hearing about someone else’s dreams, it’s hearing a story about their darling, precious children. And I tell these stories all day. I am a sad, sad man.

Off the top of my head, let me give you all the fundraisers I was either involved with or ignored last year – the PTO fall fundraiser (wrapping paper), the PTO spring fund raiser (candles), Pop Warner (a combination of begging on the street as well as selling something which escapes my memory), Little League (raffle tickets), Boy Scouts (crappy popcorn related items), and Girl Scouts (cookies). There were probably half a dozen more, but this is the list I came up with without thinking real hard (something I try to avoid). Keep in mind that as always, everything is times four. So, not only do my wife and I need to sell overpriced wrapping paper to my unsuspecting co-workers, we have to sell enough to cover four kids.

I have to get sneakier every year – once fall rolls around, people I know start avoiding me like I’m that little monkey from the movie “Outbreak.” I have to wear camouflage and sneak into their offices before work so I can hide behind the water cooler – then when they stand around the water cooler to discuss last night’s episode of The Surreal World and what that crazy Flava Flav is up to, I jump out and yell, “CAN I INTEREST YOU IN SOME SHITTY WRAPPING PAPER TO BENEFIT MY KIDS’ SCHOOL?”

Sure, they try to run, but as an experienced parent, I have anticipated this move and laid traps with poison darts at all the exits. “I have the antidote for anyone who has been ‘accidentally’ stuck with a poison dart – I’d be willing to part with individual doses for the modest price of, say, a dozen rolls of holiday wrap.” And, of course it’s “holiday wrap” because just mentioning a catalog of “Christmas wrap” into the school would cause the building to spontaneously combust. I’m not complaining, mind you – just pointing out.

Note: Did you ever notice that when someone says, “I’m not complaining,” it almost always comes right after or before something that sounds a whole lot like complaining? “What a fucking idiot my boss is – I’m not complaining, though.”

As I see it, there are two main problems associated with fundraisers. Two problems, I mean, apart from the fact that it makes everyone I know despise me, but that’s nothing new. I have five kids and no life outside my home which means I am compelled by forces well beyond my control – nature, God, zombie trance, whatever you want to call it – to talk about my kids non-stop and like they are the smartest, best looking kids in the world; therefore, my coworkers have learned to hate me long before I ever showed up selling tins of caramel popcorn.

The first major problem of fundraising is that, for whatever reason, the fundraising activity/product is never anything useful. Does anyone I know really need an oversized container of Gummy Worms? Probably not. Does anyone I know really want a pack of 10 year old cheerleaders to wash their car with sponges that have been dropped on the ground so many times they now bear less resemblance to sponges than to 100 grit sandpaper? I’m going to say, “no.”

The only two fundraisers which come even close to being exceptions to this rule come from Pop Warner football and Girl Scouts. Pop Warner doesn’t go with the pretense of selling you something you really don’t need. They have chosen a more honest and direct approach – out and out begging. Which is a fabulous idea because the only thing each kid needs is an old can to hold while they stand outside some unsuspecting business and shake down all the customers for loose change. Not only does this separate people from their money without requiring a follow up visit to deliver a product, but it is fantastic training for anyone on the football team who may decide later in life that “wino” is the career path for him. Except, we didn’t spend the money on wine. Not much of it, anyway.

And, obviously, Girl Scout cookies are a staple of every American diet. I can safely bring the GS order form into the office and not have anyone take a swing at me because people actually like GS cookies. See, the Girl Scouts have found something that works for them and they have decided to stick with it – a solid business practice that has resulted in my never having to pay for any trip or activity the girls participate in (well, except selling the cookies, which takes nearly as much of my life each year as I spend watching Monster Garage – let me tell you, that’s no five minute commitment).

The best fundraisers I have ever been a part of, though, were both when I was a kid. The first was when I was in sixth grade and we were raising money for a week long camping trip to a national park. Someone had the genius to sell light bulbs. Hear me out, now, because this was genius. Why? First, because the way the fundraiser worked was that each kid was given a big box containing perhaps 100 light bulbs packaged in pairs. Because they were light bulbs, the box was light enough to be carried by a sixth grader. The idea was that we would go door to door and sell the lightbulbs for, I can’t remember, but let’s say $10,000 a package. We got paid on the spot and the customer got their light bulbs on the spot.

What made this such a great idea is everybody needs light bulbs – they are one of those items that you usually forget until it becomes absolutely necessary to go to the store and purchase a box. And when is it absolutely necessary? When you no longer have any lamps left in the house to steal bulbs from to put into the overhead fixture in the kitchen. Admit it, you’re reading this right now by the light from a bulb you transplanted from a lamp in the living room and you haven’t been the basement in a year because that was the first place you stole bulbs. All that remains is your one bulb you keep taking from room to room. The problem is, when you do remember to buy the bulbs at the store, you buy, what, eight of them? And when you get home and start screwing them into the empty sockets, you find that you don’t have any left over at all, do you?

So, if some kid came to your door right now and offered to sell you a few boxes of bulbs, that would be pretty useful, right?

The other fundraiser we did was more along the Pop Warner begging vein, but a little more work for us. The soccer team did a “bottle drive” which was where we went around door to door asking people to donate any deposit cans and bottles to the team – at the end of the day we took all our bottles to the redemption center and turned them in for the nickel apiece. This was nice because it was a bit of the begging – Can we please have something of yours that is actually worth money? – and a bit of doing something for you – You know you were eventually just going to throw them away because there is no way you’ll ever get motivated enough to bring them to the redemption center.

For whatever reason, though, fundraisers today seem intent on selling things that nobody needs or selling things for prices no sane people would pay for them or the dreaded combination “Overpriced Crap You Don’t Want Or Need.”

The second major problem with the fundraisers is that it is no longer the kids’ job to go out and raise funds. It’s the parents’ job. Why? Because sometime before today but after 1982 when I sold light bulbs door to door like a miniature Willy Loman, parents decided that perhaps it is not the wisest thing in the world to send a 12 year old to random houses without supervision.

All of which means parents are forced to bring fundraising order forms to work and annoy as many people in their captive audience as possible. Last spring, though, was different. Fed up with the concept of selling things to coworkers (also I didn’t, technically, have any coworkers apart from Lady McBeth, the cat and the dog), so I decided that the Girl Scouts, Mab and the Duchess, would go door to door selling cookies – I would walk with them while they went up to each door and made their pitch. Clearly, I had been inside long enough all winter that my brain had ceased all cognitive function and was running on animal instinct, which, for some reason, was telling me that this door to door thing was a fantastic idea.

And it was, for about thirty minutes. Then I realized it was taking about ten minutes per house for the girls to make their pitch, get the order, then write it down. The writing part was what was killing our production time, so I soon decided that I would help with just the writing part while the girls still made the sales pitch. However, after a few more houses, I realized the girls were still pretty shy which was causing them to have to repeat a lot of things louder – you know, stuff like that which was still bogging us down. So I decided I’d just help them out with a few of the key points – you know, how much each box cost, how long until the order would come in, etc.

Twenty minutes later I’m ringing the doorbells, making the pitch by myself and writing the orders down. At one point the girls went back to the house to go pee, but I kept on working. Which turned out to be a mistake.

“Honey, call the police – there’s man on the porch claiming to be a girl scout! Pervert!”

When the orders came in, I had to write a check to cover every box myself, which meant that anyone we couldn’t get in touch with that had ordered cookies was going to cost me money. Logically, this meant I was the only one motivated to actually distribute these cookies, so every night I was the one on the phone, I was the one who had to go back door to door when it was convenient for the customer – it was a nightmare and we won’t be doing that again.

Lest you think I am just a big Complainy McWhinypants who has only criticism and no solutions, let me offer you my alternatives for these useless fundraisers:

For schools, wouldn’t it just be easier to fund them properly in the first place? Wow – was easier to come up with than I though it would be.

For all extra curricular activities, set up a concession booth at every event that sells hot dogs, chips and drinks – parents are always trying to fit dinner in before a scout meeting or right after soccer practice, etc – this kills two birds with one stone. And if you really wanted to put your organization over the top, financially speaking, sell draft beer at $4 a cup. I guarantee sales beyond your wildest expectations.