Big News!

I have been waiting for months to tell you this. Well, actually I have been hoping to make this announcement for years but I have officially been waiting to tell you for months, you know, to be for sure, for sure. And now it is for sure, for sure. I am going back to school!

Sorry if that is not as exciting to most of you as a new baby or a cross country move but I am SOOOOO excited! Like Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah Winfrey's couch excited. So pull out your Napoleon Dynamite your mom goes to college jokes if you want to because you can not rain on this parade. I have wanted this for so long!

I have long had the hope that when Chloe started Kindergarten I would be able to go back but with Alyssa staying home this year going to school on campus would be tough. For years I have listened to the church leaders encourage education and yet most of the women I know did not graduate, or in many cases even start college since we tend to marry a bit young. I married at 24 and had Alyssa at 26 so I don't have that excuse, but still, I really thought the church needed to create a program for women in this situation.

Years ago I heard that BYU added an online program but unless you physically attended BYU for two semesters you were not eligible. That is fair, but I was still bummed out. But now BYU Idaho has the Pathway program for people who did not ever attend a church school and at first it was only for the 18-30 year old age group but now they have opened it up to the over 30 crowd. It is new so it is not offered everywhere but a few months ago Seth came home from Ward Council and told me they were doing it at our Stake Center in Milwaukee.  I jumped on it right away and then recruited my friend Lisa so we could work together and carpool. She had been looking for a way to go back to school as well so she was in before I even got three words in to my sales pitch and then we wrangled a few others in as well.

Since I did not go to a church school the first year of the program is basically how you earn your way in to the online degree program. You just take 2 online classes a semester, one is institute ( I have never taken and institute class, or seminary for that matter) and the other is assigned as well so you are not working on your degree the first year. Also, for the first year you have to meet with all the local students in the program every Thursday night at the Stake Center, about an hour from here. After the first year you start work on your degree as long as you have maintained a 3.0. The tuition is only $65 a credit which you can't beat and I will not ever have to go to a BYU campus for classes. And since I do have an Associates degree they have assured me that I should not have to repeat any general ed requirements.

I applied as soon as I heard about the program and called the local Pathway missionaries and requested my transcripts and then I sat and waited for SUU to get my transcripts to BYU-I. SLCC got them there in 2 days. I ordered them from both schools the same day but they still have not arrived from SUU. And let me tell you how stupid I felt when I called SUU to request transcripts. They kept telling me I could only order them using my online student account. I kept telling them that I did not know how to access my online account because there was no such thing in 1993. They kept telling me that everyone has an account and I could get my username and password by using the e-mail address that I used when I was a student there. I kindly reminded them once again that Wilma Flinstone was my roommate when I attended SUU and that I did not have an e-mail address. So then they decided that I was not only old but that I had been on another planet since 1993 and they walked me painstakingly through their website...okay ma'am now you see the box that says My SUU Portal, that is called an icon and you can use your mouse to click on it. Yeah, I know how to use the internet! But whatever, I remember looking at the non-traditional students when I was there and wondering why they were so far behind the times, handing in hand written papers and such. I am ashamed to admit that my dorm friends would all come home and exchange funny "non-trad" stories so I suppose this was karma. The point is, it took forever to order my transcripts and even though they took the payment out on the same day as SLCC my SUU transcripts are still not in Idaho. So the application deadline was August 21st and my app still said incomplete. I was on the phone with my local missionaries and BYU-I all day and they told me that my app was considered complete anyway and that I would not be penalized. So a few days later I finally got an admittance e-mail and today, an official offer to start on September 16th, which I have accepted!

Alright, this may be a so what post for most of you but I had to share because I could not be more excited. It is going to be a busy year. Mondays we have skating and ballet. Tuesdays TKD and church. Wednesdays are our easy day with just skating (added second day of skating, a spin class, so Alyssa gets more time with peers since she won't be at school). Thursdays we have TKD and school in Milwaukee for me. Plus I will be e-schooling myself and Alyssa every day. Phew! I am a little worried about how I am going to fit all of my life in to my days this year but we will figure that out as we go because I really feel like this is an answer to a prayer and I am so grateful that this door has been opened to me.

And since we are talking about school...

We just came home from Open House for Chloe and Alex. I didn't even register them until Tuesday because I was still hoping to get in to one of the charter schools. We made it all the way to 1st and 2nd on the waiting list but school starts Tuesday so I figured it was time to make other arrangements.

We were met with such good news! They hired 8 new teachers per school so class sizes are at 21 (35 last year) and the district let each school choose whether or not they wanted to do the multi-age classrooms and our school opted not to so the teachers have only one grade to focus on and far fewer students. Alex got the same teacher as last year which was fine with me because Alex made a lot of progress last year. He kept half of his students from last year so Alex's best bud, Nate is in his class, as is his crush since preschool, Ella. He has been with those two kids all through his school years. Chloe got the same teacher that Alex had in Kindergarten and we really liked her so maybe all of this stress about schools was completely unnecessary. Alex did beg me to sign up to be room mother and I really didn't want to because my plate is just a wee bit full but I have never been able to volunteer as much as I'd like to with little ones at home so I decided to make room for one more thing.

Wish us luck!