The last to know

“Hey, you guys didn't tell me it was school picture time,” I yell over the sound of morning routines: the whirring of hairdryers and the pounding on bathroom doors.

"It was a shock to us, too. I didn't even comb my hair," said the boy's muffled voice.

“Mom! Can you tell him to hurry up?," his sister texted. "I'm going to be late!”

I mumble something about there still being time as I ignore her pleas and click on a link that had blinked into my email: My son's unsmiling face showed up on the screen.

His hair, newly barbered, was pushed up high on top of his forehead but still ever-so-slightly askew. It is a look he had painstakingly preened to seem like he had just rolled out of bed. Everything about it said Too-Cool for School.

Welcome to your child's high school years. That will be twenty-five dollars for two five-by-sevens and eight, wallet-sized reminders.

Of course, I bought prints of the boy in his berchon expression straight away, even though when they arrive - in six to forty-six weeks - the copies will live in a dining room cabinet, where I store the rest of the official mementos from my kids' school experiences.

His sister's progress reports and quarterly report cards occupy the top shelf. The letters and missives have been extracted from their envelopes and piled in ascending order from kindergarten onward. 

His are filed in about the same order, interleaving between notice of grades with concert programs, playbills, certificate awards, and dozens of stock-white envelopes with younger and younger faces staring out from little windows of transparent glassine.

Oversized serving bowls I've never used (lest they become broken or cracked) act as a bookend, keeping the pages upright and from accordioning out onto the floor at the feet of whoever opens the cabinet.

This is my system.

The organization of opportunity. A box here, a folder there. The common thread between them is an intention to file it for easy retrieval, should the need to access his first-grade third-quarter progress report materialize.

My system makes sense only to me.

Which is what I think, when my husband forwards a similar link for our daughter, who the school has somehow classified in their etched-in-stone recond as belonging to him first and to me as occasional chauffer and forgotten-item delivery person.

I tried to correct that record once after one particularly aggravating game of phone tag.  Failing, it would seem to have them with the order of operations from "DAD" to "MOM" -- at least on the first attempt -- since I am the parent who has the most flexible schedule and the one who isn't likely to be traveling far from home.

Evidently, they thought my acrimony was based soley in matrimony, because after that, all the official correspondence from school included me on a separate line at the same address … as if I were the Ex living with my Husband and his Mrs.

“Well, that's very big of me,” my husband joked.

I didn't know what to do besides laugh with Mr. Husband about how progressive we were as a family. 

“Laugh all you want," the girl tells us wryly as she reaches for her keys. "But this explains why I got called down to the guidance office in the fourth grade and handed an invitation to join the Banana Splits Club," she says before she slams yet another door. 

“I never understood why she didn't go out for that. She loves making desserts.”

“Uhm. ... Because it's for kids whose parents are getting a divorce. She thought they were telling her the bad news.”

That sounds terrible, but it's probably going to get worse when they find out you've been hoarding all these horrible pictures.