If ANYONE can believe it, we are not officially ‘Back To School’ yet. I can’t even believe it myself! Yes, we home school. Yes, we keep our own schedules and do as we please, when we please to do it. But, it would please us ALL, to be Back To School, by now!

The problem is…..our books orders are lost in Never-Never Land. Or other wise called, ‘The United States Postal Service’.  It takes us a good part of the summer to save up enough $ to have all at once, to order a good part of what we need in the first place. Still,  we ordered in plenty of time.  And we were grateful, when they offered to pay for shipping. We didn’t realize, at the time, that paying for shipping meant they would be shipping the cheapest way possible. In other words, ‘non-priority’ mail.  In other words, the post office ‘may’ track it along the way, but they don’t have to, and probably won’t, because it was mailed the cheapest way, and therefore does not deserve top service.  So they stopped tracking, at some point.

Last we knew, according to the ‘track and confirm’ number we have, our order was last through the ‘sorting facility’ in Springfield, MA, on Sept. 5th (long after we expected them) and we never got them.

Calling and going to the postal service several times, we are always told that they can’t do anything about it until THIRTEEN POSTAL DAYS. That’s like…3 weeks, before they will put out an APB on a missing shipped item. NICE.

Just now, I checked the status on our shipment again. Finally, a new update!:

	Detailed Results: Processed through Sort Facility, September 13, 2009, 2:46 pm, SPRINGFIELD, MA 01152 Processed through Sort Facility, September 05, 2009, 8:06 am, SPRINGFIELD, MA 01152 Electronic Shipping Info Received, August 28, 2009

Looks like it’s been sitting around the same place for….8 days? Excellent.

We should have known. You know why?  Because this exact same thing happened last year, when half of our order went to some other state, and we only had 1/2 our books to work with for several days!  Forgiving and forgetting’ didn’t serve us too well this time.

We’re just so aggravated at this point.  This past Saturday, when the mailman came on the rainy afternoon, without our boxes, we all just sat and sulked in the window, as we watched him drive away.  Because we knew that  no book delivery meant, we wouldn’t officially be starting school on Monday either….because the mailman doesn’t come until late afternoon.  IF he even has our books THEN!

The kids LOVE school. They have been very excited to start, for WEEKS now.  We’ve been otherwise ready to go!  They’ve been doing some school work anyway:  work sheets, writing, etc., just to do ‘something’.  But I’m a stickler to the lessons!  We’re many lessons behind! It’s not feeling enough like our regular schooling, without our books being part of it all.  We’ll catch up to where ‘I’ expect us to be soon enough.  It’s not going to throw our whole year off, I don’t think (unless this nonsense continues.)  It’s just a bummer.  I can’t let this mess take the excitement out of ‘our first day of school’.  We’re looking forward to so much this year!  We’re ready to get going!

So if you’ve been wondering where the excitement of our new schooling year has been……looks like it’s in Springfield MA, and we’re still waiting on it.