A Calendar Never Forgets

There are some things that I’ll never forget – birthdays, home run totals, movie quotes. On the flip side, there are some things I can never remember – passwords, when was the time I changed the furnace filter, what my wife said is for dinner tomorrow. Generally, I tend to remember the stuff that is important to me. One of the challenges that comes with having kids is not just remembering my important stuff, but having to remember their stuff too. Realistically, one human brain can only remember so many people’s stuff. Something is bound to fall through the cracks, but probably something minor and easy to forget. Something like, oh let’s say, sending your kids school.

We’ve got three kids in two different schools, so our calendar of who has what on what days isn’t consistent for everybody. Drop-off times, pick-up times, half-days, days off, and spring break are usually not the same. Even something as seemingly universal like Christmas break is never exactly the same. Throw your non-school related stuff on top of that like doctors appointments and after school activities, and a well organized calendar is a must. We’ve very much come to rely on our calendar to tell us what to do on any given day. However, we recently ran into a problem we never anticipated – what if the calendar is wrong?

A few weeks ago my son had his mid-winter break, which was a four-day weekend. His older sisters, who go to a different school, had their mid-winter break last week. It was also marked on the calendar as a four-day weekend. It was marked on the calendar so it must be true. One school wouldn’t give a different numbers of days than another, and and calendar wouldn’t lie to me. Would it? Turns out yes, yes it would.

After a lovely weekend, I went back to work on Monday morning and my daughters stayed home to soak in their (alleged) day off. My wife works for a college, so she was also home for her own spring break (which in no way aligns with either of the kids’ schools’ spring breaks, so that’s fun). Shortly before noon, I checked my email and saw I had something from the girls’ school with the subject line “Student Absent.” How odd that they would send that email on a scheduled off day. Must be a mistake. It has happened before where they have sent out district-wide alerts on on accident. Must be one of those. I opened the email expecting to see some kind of generic statement that didn’t apply to be, but oddly enough to this email had my daughter’s name in it. Huh.

I checked the calendar, the household source of truth, to make sure. There it was, written in on Monday “Evie and Lucy No School.” Surely, the school would send a follow up email apologizing for the mistake any moment now. Then I noticed the email actual came about an hour ago. Odd it would take them this long to send the correction. To be extra sure, I asked my wife about it. She checked the all-knowing calendar, and I wasn’t seeing things, “Evie and Lucy No School” as still there. So it is written, so it shall be. No?

What’s going on here? Did the school district not check my calendar? We checked the district’s last weekly newsletter. Was this the first time I looked at it? Yes. Should I have looked at it before? Who’s to say? I suddenly miss the days of a stack of papers coming home in a folder. An email is easy to ignore, a bright red piece of paper my kid thrusts at me will at least have a three day life span of sitting on the counter in a pile of junk mail and old pizza coupons waiting to be put in the recycling bin. Anyway, the newsletter had the previous Friday listed as a day off, but not Monday. Odd that my calendar would be right but the newsletter be wrong. I mean, it’s almost like the calendar was wrong, but that couldn’t happen. If we can’t trust the calendar, what can we trust? What else on there was wrong? What else didn’t I show up for? Was it even Monday? Is today my birthday? I can’t believe anything anymore.

I sent a very embarrassing reply to the absentee notice. Pretty sure the school administrator felt bad holding parental stupidity against my kids and said she would mark it as an excused absence. Perhaps she took pity on me. Perhaps her calendar had led her astray at some point and knows what it feels like. I mean, we can’t be the first parents to not send their kids to school because they didn’t know if they actually did have school that day or not. Ya know, when I say it that way it almost sounds like it was our fault and not the calendar’s. No, that can’t be it. Stupid calendar.