I just got an email starting out “This is to notify you that a 2008-2009 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) for HANNAH GATHMAN was processed on FEBRUARY 15, 2008 and the data will be made available to the school(s) listed on the student’s application.”
This is, knock wood, the very last FAFSA I should ever have to file — I’ve done this (and often both FAFSA and CSS/Profile) annually since 1998, when Cabell was about to start at Truman.
When you have three kids, spaced about 3 years apart, your life has these large blocks of repeated activity that gradually pass by, sort of like a deer in an anaconda. For Robin and me, it looks sort of like this:
1981-1989 — The decade of changing diapers.
1983?- 1997? — About a decade and a half of reading bedtime stories (includes several years of singing lullabies).
1986-1994 — The near-decade of dropping off, picking up, and occasionally forgetting (just me, not Robin) kids at school. (In 1994 we moved to the Schoolhouse and they started riding the bus).
1998-2004 — Six years of driving weekly to St. Louis for St. Louis Irish Arts. (Mostly me, not Robin). By the way, you can still go to the photo album that I designed and search by “who” for “gathman” and find a lot of pics of Hannah and Sophie. All done with ASP written in VBScript, worst excuse for a programming language on the planet. Also in this time period, a lot of traveling to Feises and Fleadhs.
1996-2005 — Decade or so of teaching kids to drive and worrying about them out somewhere with the car.
2003ish -> ? Indeterminate period of worrying about kids’ career, romantic, housing, and various other life choices.
Not that I’m complaining. I remember a long time ago, before Cabell was born, that sometimes I was bored. No longer a problem.
