Filling out forms

Yesterday, when my son asked in a loud voice, "Mom, where's the emergency form?", I didn't panic.  I smiled.

It's that time of year again.

Schools are sending home piles and piles of forms to fill out, over and over again.  A year ago I wrote about how I create a master form on my computer with all sorts of pesky information, a form that's easy to update .  (One piece of that information is names/addresses of people to contact in an emergency; that's why my son was calling this the "emergency form".)

Usually, I hand the master form over to the kids and have them use it to fill out their school forms.  Except that this year, they've learned the drill so well that they didn't even need me to tell them what to do.  (We usually keep the master form on the bulletin board near the phone, but I'd taken it down to update some phone numbers, so all he really wanted was some help finding the one form with all the answers.)

Even with the master form in front of them, the boys still had lots of questions, which shows one reason why filling out forms is so hard.  My master form lists a "medical provider", but the school forms asked for a "physician".  We had to translate between those words.

So I guess I could pretend I'm doing all this NOT  because I'm a lazy bum trying to save myself from mind-numbing work (which would be the truth), but because it teaches my children valuable administrative skills they'll need some day.  Hah!

Here's the list of information that I keep on that master list.

• Child’s Name 
• Birth date 
• Address
• Mother’s Name 
• Home Telephone/Cell phone 
• Address 
• Work, Work Address, Work Telephone 
• Father’s Name 
• Home Telephone /Cell phone
• Address 
• Work, Work Address , Work Telephone 
• Emergency Contact/Person to whom child may be released (some forms need 3 names)
• Name, Address, Telephone 
• Name, Address, Telephone 
• Name, Address, Telephone 
• Medical Provider, Address & Telephone 
• Dentist, Address & Telephone 
• Special Disabilities 
• Allergies
• Insurance company, policy number, telephone

This year, my kids worked pretty hard on their forms.  I myself spent 5 minutes proofreading and correcting the huge stack they'd plowed through, and then we were done.  Score!