Spring Break

This last week has been spring break. Seriously, spring break is way more fun when you’re not the one who has to figure out what your kids are going to do to stay out of trouble while you’re working… 

Now that Bella is 16, she can get an actual job, so she started working at daycare. This was her first week, which meant that she had to do all of the paperwork, which caused all sorts of drama. But at least she has a job, a way to earn money and a place to go both for spring break and for the summer. Gabe, on the other hand, does not. The church his school is at put on a VBS for four days, so he went to that, but they were done at 12. Normally he’s done with school at noon, but he goes over to my friend Angela’s house for a couple of hours. However, she has five kids, and the big ones were all also at VBS and her husband was out of town for a funeral, so she didn’t have enough seats to take Gabe to her house. So my schedule for this week has been too work for home from 7-7:30am, then get the kids ready to go, take Gabe to VBS at 9, drop the other two off at daycare, work in the office for two hours, go pick up Gabe and drop him off at Angela’s house, work at home for 2.5 hours, go pick up Gabe, work at home with Gabe for another two hours and then wonder why I’m short on hours and can’t get anything done. It’s super fun. There’s no way I could keep up this schedule long term.

Then on Wednesday, this things got super interesting. My plan was to eat lunch at home, since I had to pick Gabe up at noon. As such, I had no food beyond my normal mid-morning snack. It was garbage day, and a friend of mine was out of town for the day and asked if Bella could take her trash out. So I dropped Bella off there, took Gabe to VBS, turned around and picked up Bella. On the way, I called the fingerprint guy, since Bella needed to get fingerprinted for her background check. He told me he could get her in at 12 or 12:30. I told him that I could do 12:15, since I had to get Gabe at 12. He put me in at 12 and said we could be a few minutes late. My new plan was to take Bella with me to get Gabe, get her fingerprints done, bring her back to work and then just buy lunch at work and then work in the office for two hours into I left to pick up Gabe. Fine. At 11:40, I walked over to daycare and picked up Bella, then we picked up Gabe. When I picked him up, he asked if we could go home and get his construction vest and construction hat. I told him no, because we had an appointment. We went to do fingerprints and as soon as we walked in they asked to see Bella’s ID. Um, she doesn’t have ID. She doesn’t have a drivers license or a permit. I have a copy of her passport on my phone, but it’s expired so it won’t work. She literally has no identification at all, because she hasn’t needed it. So we got back in the car, trying to figure out what to do. We could get her a state id or she could get a drivers permit, but she hasn’t even started studying for that. As soon as we were back in the car, Gabe asked if we could get the construction vest, since we didn’t have a fingerprint appointment any more. 

I called the DMV to figure out what we needed to go to get an id and what information we needed. Birth certificate and two proofs of residence, such as bills with her name on them. Since she doesn’t have any, if my name is on them and her birth certificate, that’ll work. At this point, I realized what a good thing it was that they issued her a new birth certificate when I adopted her. I thought it was weird at the time, because I didn’t actually birth her, but trying to deal with paperwork like this with Jacqui’s name still on the paper would have been way more complicated. Anyway, we went home and I got all of the papers and Gabe’s construction vest. Then I dropped him off at Angela’s, so at least now I was down one kid. Then I went to McDonalds because by now I was ridiculously hungry and looking at sitting in the DMV for an hour before I could get back to work to eat. Fun. I hurriedly ate in the DMV parking lot, then we went in and got her id. Then we went back to do fingerprints and I drove her back down to work and walked into my office at 2:05. So I was able to work for 30 minutes before having to leave to go pick up Gabe.

Then right as I was about to leave, Angela called and asked if I could pick get up some noodles for dinner, so I ended up at the grocery store before picking up Gabe. Needless to say, I did not get hardly any work in during the regular work day and my head was so fried that I was a mess by the time Pat got home. It all got done, but nothing worked according to plan and I learned my lesson about letting the kids passports expire. Also, I made Pat go put Claudia’s garbage can away.

And that was spring break.