kiwords

Remember how I decided to go back to school and subsequently set off actual alarms in my house? Have you noticed how I haven't mentioned it since? There's a reason for that.

Actually, there are about twelve thousand, four hundred, and seventeen reasons for that. Would you like me to whine and share them all with you? Doesn't that sound like fun?

Okay, how about the highlights instead?

Who has time for something like that? Not me. That's insane.

Who has extra money lying around for tuition and books that hello probably are all marked up and highlighted in the wrong spots because you know I'm too cheap to pay for new textbooks? Again, not me.

I have FOUR CHILDREN. Three of whom are home all the time. Two of them want educating, and the little one needs rescuing from herself regularly. The remaining one goes away for school, but that just means an astonishing amount of driving here and there and signing forms and paying random fees and attending random meetings.

It has been THIRTEEN YEARS since I last attended school. Many of the free and available brain cells I had back then have since been used up by important matters like learning how to make perfect pancakes and remembering to buy diapers.

Clay works REALLY HARD around here already. Does it really make sense for me to toddle off to some class and leave him alone when he should be enjoying a restful evening with his loving family and the attentions of his adoring wife? (note: by "attentions of his adoring wife" here I actually mean "that time when his adoring wife retreats to the bathtub with a book and a fistful of chocolate and refuses to respond to children's requests for anything." Obviously.)

So what I did was to apply for readmission to the college I last attended, get all my paperwork in order, peruse things online, and then...wait.

Days flicked past, as they will, and would glance occasionally across the room at my readmission letter, and wonder if I was going to actually go ahead and do it.

And I can't really explain it, but when the very last day to register was breathing down my neck, I went ahead and did it.

I did.

I registered for a class.

And last night I finally got ahold of my transcripts and discovered that I'd already taken that class, fourteen years ago. *headdesk*

But I scrambled, and I got myself admitted to another class, and now here I am, embarking on another attempt at degree-dom. I'm still not sure this is a sensible thing to do, and it's sort of embarrassing to admit that I'm stillllll crawling toward my bachelor's degree (I prefer to pretend that I already have it. I don't LIE and say that I do, but I may use ambiguous wording and let you assume what you will).

I figure, though, that this must be the time to do this. If I couldn't be stopped by my own arrogant pride and ambiguity, if I pressed on, despite the costs and risks and a puking toddler and the wrong class and hello, did I tell you it SNOWED TODAY and the campus is a million miles across Denver?

I somehow got there today, despite it all, so perhaps this really is the time. As I told Clay when I first decided to return to school, I just can't hit the snooze button on my own life anymore.

School is in session. Here we go.