Number One Reason: Taxes. Yes, I was the great procrastinator this year, although when we were young and just married, we used to borrow someone's computer and be frantically working to get it done in time to drive through the post office emergency tax drop off by midnight. It was easier to do that in the days before kids, mortgages, and itemized deductions. Now, I have the financial aid stuff to do after I do the taxes, and unfortunately, financial aid applications make taxes look like a walk in the park. I loathe April. Last year, we were also trying to evaluate financial aid offers from the various universities my oldest applied to...at least this year, we are spared that agony. It all starts again next year with the next college-bound kid.
Another reason I loathe April is the fact that it is standardized testing month in Hawaii. One period of testing determines so much for a school. Many of the kids don't see the point, since the results don't come for several months, have no direct effect on them, and some, at least at the 10th grade level, see it as a way to stick it to the school. I don't know why politicians and people who are not in schools working with kids think that one standardized test, often badly written, is a true measure of what kids can do - and then use it as a stick to punish schools. At the very least, they are missing the "carrot" part of the "carrot and the stick".
In the middle of the taxes and pondering the state of American education, I was running back and forth to the kitchen to work on the baking: sandwich bread, cinnamon sugar biscuits, and mozzarella biscuits. The 24 cinnamon sugar biscuits are already gone, which is its own testament, I suppose.
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