Flashback Friday

Prompt: Did your family have any back-to-school traditions when you were growing up? Were you generally eager or reluctant to start school? Was buying school supplies a big deal or did you order them through the school? Were there any school supplies you particularly loved?…

Some homeschooling families greet the coming school year with great fanfare, purchasing new materials and taking “first day” photos. Others do school year-round and never have a real “first day” of school.

And some, like my family, have a first day of school, but don’t make much of a fuss about it.

In fact, we made so little fuss that I can’t remember a single thing about any of my baker’s dozen first days of school (until college–but that’s a whole ‘nother story!)

That’s not to say that I don’t remember any of the circumstances surrounding “back-to-school.”

I remember going to the packed out back-to-school sales and perusing the completely unreasonable lists all those others schools had for their students. We didn’t get backpacks and lunchbags and fancy binders and pencil cases and the like. We got milk crates to store our school books in (since we’d usually destroyed our old crates, having carted them around the house and indeed the state during the previous school year)–but that was about the only thing that was distinct for each student. Otherwise, we stocked up huge piles of notebooks, notebook paper (in wide and college rules), handwriting tablets, yellow wooden pencils, and erasers.

In the olden days, Lincoln’s tax was $0.065 per dollar–and it rounded down from the half. So if you bought something that cost exactly one dollar, you’d be charged $1.06. But if you bought two things that cost exactly one dollar, you’d be charged $2.13. One year, there was something that cost exactly one dollar, and each of us kids went through the checkout with our one item. The checkout lady tried in vain to convince us to combine our purchase (instead of passing the leftover cash to the next kid in line.) We tried in vain to explain to her that we could save three whole cents by doing it our way. (We definitely knew how to pinch our pennies!)

And I remember Mom reminiscing about her own school days. Every so often, we kids would complain about how we’d been deprived of this supply or that–how we had to share our school supplies or whatever. And when we complained, Mom might tell her story:

When she was a little girl, the fourth of twelve children, she got just what was on the list and nothing else. The list decreed that each child had to have a set of eight crayons (red, violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, black, and brown.) And so Mom had a set of eight crayons. All the other children came to school with their sets of twenty-four. There was nothing she could do about it–her family was poor, they had what was required.

We, of course, never lacked for crayons. There was always an enormous bucket of partially used crayons around the house that we could use at any time. And if we needed nice, unbroken crayons, we could always borrow from Mom’s set–for every year, Mom bought herself a shiny new box of crayons, the biggest box that could be bought.

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I’m givin’ it a go with yet another carnival. I’ve enjoyed reading Barbara H’s flashbacks…which led me to Linda’s… and this week, the prompt looked so interesting that I want to play too!

Prompt: What did you want to be when you grew up? Why did you want to be that, and did you do it? Did you consistently plan to be whatever it was, or did you change your mind often?…

When I was young, I wanted to be a Mom. As the second of seven children, I grew up changing diapers (cloth), grinding baby food, and keeping tight rein on squirrelly youngsters.

In my late elementary years, I wanted to be a homesteading mom. I was entranced by the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, had entered into the normal pre-teen-girl horse-obsessed mode, and was overjoyed to find all sorts of 1970s back-to-the-earth homesteading manuals at our local library.

In Junior High, I started helping out with a girl’s club at our church–and when the teacher had to bail, I took over. I discovered that I loved teaching. I assisted in a fourth grade classroom for one year and actually enjoyed grading papers, writing tests, and figuring out ways to help kids learn. And so I figured that when I grew up, I’d be a homeschool mom. Of course, by then, I was becoming a bit of a pragmatist and realized that I couldn’t just count on being a mom–I should probably have a back-up plan. I would be a teacher.

I was chatting with an aunt one day as we drove through the hills around my grandparents house. Somehow we got on the topic of what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I wanted to be a teacher. She told me she wondered if she hadn’t really explored her options before deciding on being a teacher. She wondered if she’d have still chosen it if she’d felt like she had more options.

She got me thinking, and I spent a while exploring my options. I perused encyclopedias, college course catalogs, and occupational outlook handbooks. Even though I found dozens of degrees and occupations interesting, I ended up with five on my list of serious contenders: teaching, midwifery, nursing, dietetics, and English. Of course, English was quickly knocked off the list as being completely impractical–what can one do, after all, with an English major? Midwifery was struck from the list once I discovered that midwives cannot legally deliver home births in the state of Nebraska.

Which left me with teaching, nursing, and dietetics. I started thinking practicals: Which one would be most likely to let me do what I really wanted to do when I grew up? I finally arrived at dietetics. After all, a dietitian can be full-time and support herself if she has to. Or she can do on the side consulting as supplemental income if she’d really prefer to, say, be a mom or something.

It was decided. I would be a dietitian. I was fourteen years old.

Eleven years later, I’m a Registered Dietitian. Currently, I teach college students (many of them future dietitians) how to cook. Someday, I want to teach mothers how to feed their families. I wouldn’t mind working with a nursing home population, either. Or maybe I’ll get my Ph.D. and spend the rest of my life teaching future dietitians about the importance of food and family.

Or maybe, just maybe, I might be able to do what I’d really like to do…what I’ve wanted to do all along–to be that woman. I’ll settle in a little town or neighborhood. I’ll get involved with the community. I’ll be the house with the revolving door, with kids and adults coming in and out. I’ll share cooking tips with other mothers as we watch our kids play in the neighborhood park. I’ll do workshops and classes through one of the local churches. I’ll consult a few hours a month for the nursing home in the next town over. I’ll homeschool my children, hand-sew all my clothes, and can produce from my own garden. I’ll host Bible studies in my home and five-day-clubs in my yard. I’ll be a local La Leche League leader and maybe eventually become an international board certified lactation consultant. And when the women in the neighborhood need a helping hand, a shoulder to cry on, a woman to help them when they’re having a baby–they’ll know that they can come to me.

That’s what I want to be when I grow up.

A girl can dream, right?

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