My mom used to have a problem keeping the names of her son, grandson and dog straight.

When she called "Bingo," everyone looked up to see who she was referring to. Sometimes she surprised us because she was, in fact, calling our much-missed shar-pei.

I can relate. Ever since my son became a big brother, I've started accidentally calling him by my little brother's name. It doesn't happen all the time, but it happens often enough that I can't really make fun of my mom as much as I'd like to.

It's rare when I mix up my son and daughter's real names, but I mix up their nicknames all the time. I don't think my daughter has any idea that when I call her "Bun," I'm actually using her brother's pet name.

The mix-ups don't happen as much as simply forgetting their names altogether. My brain will stutter and, if I'm lucky, I'll manage to spit out a "you" in the direction of the kid I'm trying to address.

My confusion seems to be getting more complex with age. Now I'm mixing up their identities.

Over the weekend, I had to put together both of their enrollment packets for the upcoming school year. Almost all the information was identical, so it made sense to go back and forth between the forms for each kid.

I think my problem started when I filled out one emergency card and started using it to copy pediatrician, dentist and emergency contact information onto the other one.

It was going well until I caught myself assigning my 12-year-old a 2003 birthdate and writing my own name where my daughter's belonged. The addresses really tripped me up. If I got the street addresses right, the ZIP codes tended to come out wrong. I could pretend that accidentally using my home address for my work address was a statement about the amount of work I regularly bring home, but it wasn't. There were just so many names, numbers and abbreviations floating around my brain by that point that it's amazing that I managed to write anything intelligible down at all.

It would have taken careful scrutiny to catch my errors, but I felt compelled to fix them. After all, the information I was providing was what the school office would use in case of an emergency. I somehow doubt the kids' dentist would appreciate being called at the office to be told that one of the kids had an upset stomach and needed to be picked up.

Trying to sort through their medical histories was like a puzzle. I've written that my son has an amoxicillin allergy on so many forms that it practically wrote itself. Aside from that critical information, though, I had trouble recalling the details of last summer's physicals. I knew that there were needles involved. I had to just cross my fingers that the ones that pricked my kids were the ones they needed for admittance to school.

By the end of the endeavor, I wasn't even sure I still had the ability to do simple arithmetic and I was especially nervous as I wrote the check for their school shirts and supplies because it was the last check in the box.

Luckily, when it counted, I got it right.

The kids really would have been in trouble if I couldn't get them into school and they had to be homeschooled by a mom who can't even keep track of their names.

When she's not being a reporter, Treena Shapiro is busy with her real job, raising a son and daughter. She blogs at www.honoluluadvertiser.com, or reach her at tshapiro@honolulu advertiser.com.