Tuesday, September 2, 2008

School Daze

It's official. The new school year is kicking my butt. (No, we didn't just start school today. I am competent enough to handle one day. This is week three for us, and I'm apparently not competent enough to sustain that first day performance for three weeks.)

Getting up at six am is the worst part. I'm not a morning person. I'm not even a before noon person. It is still dark out at six am. My body flatly refuses to accept that it is daytime when it is still dark out. The alarm goes off and I have the same reaction every morning: "WTF?! Who set the $@%#!&^ alarm clock for the middle of the night? Oh...no. That's just not possible. Already?! &*%!"

But my scatterbrained kid's morning performance is a close second. My older son is very, very bright, and very, very distracted. He talks at me a mile a minute while my brain is working in slow motion, and somehow manages to misplace his glasses/wallet/bus pass/homework/shoes every single morning. Last night I asked him 16 times, "Are you ready for school tomorrow? Do you have any homework left? Is your backpack packed? Are you SURE?" To which he responded each time, "YES, Mom!" with much disgusted eye-rolling. At eleven, he's just on the brink of coming into his own as a teenager. I shudder to think what he'll be like in two years, once he's in the full grip of testosterone psychosis.

This morning, he couldn't find his glasses, his wallet, his student ID, or his bus pass. He hadn't done his reading response and hadn't added his reading totals, nor had he given me any of the papers that needed signing. He discovered each of these lacks individually, after I asked him, "Do you have your [fill in the blank]?" To which he responded each time, "Uh...no! I'll go find it." Note the choice of word here. Not "I'll go get it," which would imply he knows where it is, but "I'll go find it," which implies (correctly) that he has no freakin' clue where it is.

By the time I finally got him out of the house (after sending him back in from the car when I discovered he had socks but no shoes), I knew we were going to be racing the bus to the bus stop. We lost. So I hung an illegal U-turn and hauled him through three different school traffic jams to the middle school, sans sunglasses, which were in my purse on the counter, in the brilliant morning light, and before my morning coffee. "Why are you so mad, Mom?" he asked, bewildered.

By the time I got home from that little unplanned jaunt, I was 20 minutes late waking up my younger son for school. "Come on, Sweetie. Time to wake up. We're really late today," I whispered. Younger son smiled sleepily, stretched leisurely, opened his eyes slowly, and looked at the clock. "Oh, you think?" he exclaimed, with a vast wealth of sarcasm. "Next time, wake me up earlier, Mom!"

It's eight am. I'm going back to bed.

14 comments:

patrice said...

I am so dreading Friday this week. DH is going away on a trip which means it is up to me to get my 10th grader to the bus on time ... at 6:30 a.m. Cutting back on the bus routes this year means that the bus stop is pretty far to be walking to in the dark, so DH takes him on his way to work. So the precedent has been set. Darn. At least my 2nd grader doesn't have to be at the bus stop until 8:35. I feel your pain!

Tracy Purtscher said...

Ahhh those were the days.

Just thinking, one day you'll look back on this and laugh.

Really?!? Socks but no shoes?!? He walked to the car and didn't notice?!? LOVE IT!!! LOLOLOL

Kim said...

AS Marlon Brando said in Apocalypse Now: "the horror, the horror."

sophanne said...

socks- no shoes- too funny. (when you're not the one in the midst of it-

Anonymous said...

feeling your pain girlfriend. I am feeling your pain....

Karen said...

Sounds fun. Not! I do not miss those days one little bit. :)

Tammy said...

Ah yes... reason #12-a that I homeschool. lol

Anonymous said...

You poor baby, you had to endure all that without coffee? That son is lucky to be alive, methinks. (My #2 son was lucky to make it through those years alive, too, but take heart! He is a delight now that I am no longer responsible for him.)

Patty said...

You poor dear. I hope you got to go back to bed! Then again, I never get to sleep in anymore and going back to bed is always the juggle of 'should I nap when he does or shower'? Naturally, I always get company on the afternoons I decide to sleep over showering... Still, I hope YOU got some extra rest. After all, you do have a lace project lying around your house...

The A.D.D. Knitter said...

Testosterone Psychosis!! I believe I am in the grips of Estrogen Overload with my 13 year old!:) She wakes up an hour early to straighten her hair and douse her entire body in ghastly perfume...and is still late to school!

Unknown said...

i get up at 5.30am and now it is dark here too. However, I have nu humans to worry about! I would not cope well if others were also here and up.Just the dogs to deal with. I am out by 6.30am to go to the pool.
And I still at almost 50 wake some mornings with dread and have to remind myself there is no school today.

Angelika said...

Really, you poor thing. I feel for you. You gotta love that offspring of ours, especially the male, going towards teenage years, kind, if they ever make it that far. It's 3 am for me right now and I can't sleep, the dog seems to want to go out and socialize outside in the middle of the night and I'm knitting, because I can't sleep. Go figure. And I have to run the same game as you in a few hours.

Anonymous said...

My best friend calls it "testosterone poisoning," but the symptoms are the same. I have to haul my 12yo son to school, as we moved out of the area zoned for his school (without moving him to a, um, different school), but I only have to roust him 2 mornings a week. I work nights and don't go to bed until around noon, so I'd be up then anyway. But lord is he a bear to get moving/organized in the morning on those days!

sheep#100 said...

Advice from the mother of a morning person: buy both sons alarm clocks. Stay in bed as long as you can.