Ever have one of those mornings when life jumps around from the corner, scares the crap out of you and then runs away laughing? Yeah?! Me too. Like this morning. Which, started out like any normal morning. I set my alarm for 6am, hit snooze for as long as I possibly can before wrenching myself out of bed roughly an hour (or less) before the bus is due to arrive.
So like clockwork, at 7:19am I finally lurched out of bed realizing I was nineteen minutes behind schedule, throw a sweatshirt over my pajamas and groggily walked down the hallway, opening doors and switching on lights one by one. The first door belongs to my youngest. She is the most stubborn and hardest to get going in the mornings. When I say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree in disdain for rising out of bed early then you completely understand how awful waking her up is. The word "inertia" comes to mind. Because my oldest is out the door with my handy hubby before I hit the snooze button the fifth time, and my middle only requires a slight rustling to get her going, all my efforts are focused on my youngest. Micromanaging comes into play and being the non micromanager I am, the process is just as painful for me as it is for her.
After a solid thirty-five minutes of pushing and prodding and reminding and reinforcing and pleading, I wrangled the girls into the laundry room for appropriate outerwear and backpacks. I should stop here to cue you all in that we have three dogs. One maltipoo and two scottie dogs. The maltipoo is only five pounds and has a bladder that needs relieving roughly nine hundred and fifty two times every morning. In order to stop the peeing from happening in my house, we often walk him to the bus stop. This little lap of luxury makes the older, very vocal scottie dogs extremely jealous.
Somewhere in between book reports sized 16x20, clipping a leash onto the maltipoo's collar, remembering to pack snacks, water bottles, and permission slips to the field trip....the garage door was opened. One of the scottie dogs escaped with the maltipoo (dragging his leash behind him), my middle child holding third place as best she can and me in dead last.
Half way down the road, I realized I'm not wearing a bra, I can't run in the rain boots I'm sloshing around in, and I left my 8 year old back at the house holding my cup of coffee. At this point, however, I was too far down the road to go back for the car but too far behind to make a difference in the hot pursuit.
I watched my child and two dogs dart in and out of yards as I ran forward. By the time we all reached the next bus stop, another parent had stopped the mad dash of the scottie dog (but actually it was mostly because he is fat and was too tired to continue the game of chase) and my daughter had gotten a hold of the maltipoo's leash.
Now the race back to our bus stop was the prime objective. I instructed my daughter to go back and make sure her sister was ok. When I got into eyesight I could tell the pair of them were squabbling over the book report and my coffee. And wouldn't you know it, the big yellow bus rounded the corner just in the nick of time. I yelled down to my daughter to put my coffee cup on the mailbox and run to the bus.
"Put the coffee on the MAILBOX!!!" pant, pant, pant. "GGGggooooo" "RUN!!" pant, pant pant. "Goodbye...I love you!!" pant, pant, pant. "why aren't you running???" "Goooo, FAST!!" pant, pant pant.
The bus driver was kind enough to wait for the girls who loaded the bus with minimal wear and she even pulled up and stopped to open the bus doors and hand me two biscuits for the dogs.
But I didn't give the dogs her treats because they were jerks.
