Oh! The Drama!

Seems like a blog post title about drama should have a healthy dose of exclamation points.

I've had a dramatic morning this morning. It makes me realize that I quite prefer boring monotony, thank you very much.

It started with my e-mail. Frontier bought Verizon and has been warning for several months that my e-mail address would change. I thought I'd preempt the change and show them a thing or two by switching to g-mail. The only problem was that while I could receive g-mail I could not figure out how to set up my inbox to send from g-mail. I thought I had until the end of the year to make the switch completely, so I was taking my own sweet time to work out the bugs in my little system.

Now, I'm not really getting very much e-mail, and sending is right out. It might not have been too big of a deal, except the Game On! diet (yes, I'm going to use an exclamation point every time I write it, OK) requires communication to earn daily points. Without e-mail, communication becomes more difficult.

What's that you say? What about using the phone?

Yes, I could use the phone, and I have, but the real problem is that today is the day to turn in scores. All the teams are sending ME their team scores and I'm sure, eagerly awaiting the results for the whole group.

While was trying to get the e-mail situation fixed, and by "trying," I mean checking my inbox every few minutes to see if the problem had magically resolved itself, the phone rang. It was the title company helping us with our home refi. (Super low rates now, don't you know!!) Refinancing has been a bit like a pregnancy: you wait and wait and wait and all of a sudden your water breaks and everything becomes quite urgent.

We signed what we thought were all the papers on Friday, but evidently, some got added at the last minute. And by last minute, I mean we had an hour to sign and fax them back, or forfeit our rate and go back to square one. Thank goodness Robert was home, working on his bike in the garage and not at work. Or that I wasn't over at the school volunteering (don't laugh, it happens) because we would not have made the deadline.

I printed out the papers and we were in the middle of signing and getting ready to run them over to the UPS store to pay $1 a page to fax them (are we really the only ones left with out a fax machine in our house?) when we got a call from the middle school.

This dramatic development has a bit of back story:

On Friday of last week, I got a phone call from the vice principal letting me know that school enrollment was higher than predicted and they were able to bring on an extra teacher. They needed kids to move from Orange Hall (Ethan's current hall) to Green Hall to reduce some class sizes while building the class of the new teacher. Unfortunately, this seems to be Ethan's educational lot in life: Whenever there is a new teacher, he is always asked to move. Well, not this time.

Luckily, the school only needed 15 volunteers to move and asked the parents to notify them if their student wanted to stay. I called and left a message on the Principal's voice mail letting her know Ethan wanted to stay in Orange and thought that was the end of the story.

It was moving day and the school had a list of students moving to Green Hall. Ethan was on the list. This caught him off guard and he explained that he was NOT supposed to move to Green, that his mother had called had said he was staying in Orange. There was probably a grumpy school employee who said something like, "Sorry schmuck, but you're on the list. You gotta move now. So get your stuff. We're going to Green." (I'm just guessing.)

Ethan, confused and overwhelmed and definitely not wanting to move, ended up in the office in tears. My friend Christine called and gave me the low down. (I highly recommend having a friend in the middle school office!) She told me exactly what to do. Evidently they needed the request in WRITING. She gave me an e-mail address and told me to send an e-mail right away, which I did. She helped Ethan calm down, clearing out the health room, dimming the lights and suggesting he say a prayer, which he did. She just called to say he felt much better and was going to math.

Whew!

Here's hoping for a very boring, very predictable afternoon.

*Update*

The afternoon was not predictable and not boring. I found out from an understandably upset mother that I'd neglected to recognize her missionary son at an activity last night. It was a HUGE error on my part and I felt completely awful about it.

Then, when Jonah came off the bus he was crying and said he'd been kicked, punched and poked in the eye. Witnesses corroborate the story and it appears he did not deserve the attack.

So far, Isaac is the only one to avoid the drama of the day. However, he did get a little dramatic when his after school snack was not immediately forthcoming the minute he walked in the door.