I am.
My mother is a list maker.
My dad's mother is a list maker.
I come by it all kinds of naturally.
I like making lists. I LOVE scratching things off lists. What if I do something that isn't on my beloved list? I add it to the list just so I can scratch it off. Yep. I'm THAT kind of person.
Here is my list for all things related to moving:
The point is not for you to read every line item(sorry it's a crappy picture quality). The point is for you to see the number of things on the list. There are several (understatement). And I know there are several more (another understatement) things that need to be added to the monster "To Do" list prior to us moving.
For some reason, when I start to get overwhelmed about an upcoming thing, I revert back to paper. There are millions of apps that would probably work well at managing my lists. I can't use them. I have to physically scratch something off with an actual real-life pen to make it feel official. Pencils are also inadequate in my list-world, in case you were wondering.
The other day, thanks to a gracious friend watching my kids for a couple of hours, I managed to accomplish ONE item on my list: obtaining birth certificates for my kids. James is 2. Reese is about to be 1. No, I had not found it necessary to go get those precious documents yet. They live in my house. That was enough proof for me that they were borned. Getting birth certificates really shouldn't have been a big deal, but for some reason I was absolutely dreading this task. Driving downtown, finding a place to park, finding the right government building, finding the right office inside the building, filling out the right forms, having the right form of payment with me, yada yada yada. I just plain didn't wanna do it. Which is why I've put it off for so long. Yes, you can request these documents through the mail or online, but the price goes from $10/copy to $30+/copy for those other methods. The spirit of Dave Ramsey in me wouldn't let me pay ridiculous amounts more just because I was being a wuss about navigating in downtown Raleigh. I lived in Seoul, Korea, for goodness sakes. My parents let me and two other 13 year old girls gallivant to and from an indoor amusement park using the subway system there with no adult supervision. If I handled that as a 13 year old, to be sure I can handle downtown RALEIGH as a 35 year old, right?!
Anyway...back to birth certificate procurement. After leaving my friend's house and realizing I forgot my wallet and driving back home to get it and then going to the bank to get cash to pay for the oh-so-important documents and finding a place to park and getting to be "wand-ed" by the xray security guy because I had on a belt and Danskos which apparently always set off the xray machine and finally making it to the right person to fill out the paperwork... I was with the birth-certificate-lady for about 10 minutes. That's it. The person beside me trying to get her 3 week old baby's birth certificate was having a time of it because his name was apparently spelled wrong on it. The kind government worker was gently explaining how the mom needed to follow this simple 352 step process involving approximately 895 peoples' signatures to get his name corrected. I was quite grateful my process only took 10 minutes. After driving not-so-directly out of the downtown area back to my friend's house, I couldn't wait to scratch off "birth certificates" off of my list. Only, after I did, I felt like just scratching the one thing off wasn't enough. It seemed like such a complex task, I almost wrote all the steps down just so I could scratch them off. It would've looked something like this:
At least THAT list would make me feel more accomplished!
Are you a list maker?
No comments:
Post a Comment