My last post was about things I am thankful for. This one is about something I’m not thankful for. I am starting a new tradition (if it doesn’t already exist) that I will call the Post-Thanksgiving Bitch and Moan Fest. You in?
Good.
Because of the nature of the floating shifts at my wife’s part time job, I must often use pieces of my vacation time to take the kids to school and day care or pick them up. Picking them up is easy; you just show up and ask for your kid. You repeat the process until you have everybody you started the day with. Then you go home.
Dropping them off in the morning is a royal pain in the butt. Specifically, getting the kindergartener up, clothed, fed, and into the car in reasonable amount of time will be the death of me.
The kid is not a morning person. I get that. I’ll never forgive 7 a.m. for showing up uninvited day after day, and yet I get up every morning because it’s part of my job. Kindergarten is his job. On one level, he understands that, but that one level is the last to become conscious in the morning. The intervening levels complain that the light hurts their eyes. Hurt eyes make it difficult to go back to sleep.
They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day. He’s not buying it. It’s infuriating, how much like me he can be. I make him eat, which he does in tiny, protesting bites. I even set an example by choking down something myself, if I can find a moment between prodding him to eat and packing a lunch that he might nibble at before recess. His master plan is to build up his appetite for a big snack after school before pestering his parents to take him out to eat shrimp. It’s a bad plan.
The lunch sandwich: made with love, battered in transit, nibbled at with indifference.
Assuming we didn’t spend a half hour pouting over the lack of stylish clothes to wear to kindergarten, we will only be moderately late when it’s time for coats and shoes. Perhaps there is no five-year-old who can maintain a sense of urgency; there is none in my morning. When a dad says “Hurry up!” 100 times in the space of five minutes, you might think there’d be no time in between for a boy to be distracted by a piece of lint. There 99 such opportunities.
Finally delivering the boy to school, it is only a matter of dropping off his brother at day care and trying to escape before the little boy’s crying stabs the dagger of guilt into my heart. Feeling like I’ve already had a full day’s work, I head to my job to hunt with the other late-comers for a precious parking spot, because the university we work at doesn’t believe that all its daytime employees should be able to park there on the same day.
My eye stops twitching about an hour later.
This leads me full circle to something I am very thankful for: my wife, who conducts this process more often and with much more grace than I do.
Snoozing on the Sofa 
My wife does all three kids every morning and I couldn’t be more thankful for that! Lol. Kudos to them for having the patience.
You’re one lucky dude. I still haven’t figured out what’s in it for your wife though.
Oh GAWDDDDDD…mornings suck. I don’t even talk to my kids. I just push and shove them.
You just gave me a great idea: maybe I should just invest in a sheep dog.
I used to go through the exact same thing with my kids. None of us were morning people. The funny thing is that now that they are all grown and out of the house, my internal clock wakes me up at the latest 4:00 a.m. every morning. What I wouldn’t give to finally be able to sleep in. LOL
Your children robbed you of your sleeping in years. Sounds about right.
I like the venting cycle that lands back in gratitude. And don’t even get me started on mornings. I get my feelings hurt every time the alarm clock goes off.
Why did we ever let the morning people set the schedule?
They woke up first and took over the world. We were still groggy when they were barking out commands.
Damn those early birds! Always getting the worm.
“you just show up and ask for your kid. You repeat the process until you have everybody you started the day with. Then you go home.”
Gosh, you make parenting sound so easy when you say it like that…Of course, that was before I read the rest of your post;)
Every time it seems easy it’s just because you haven’t gotten to the hard part yet.
My mother solved the lack of any “five-year-old who can maintain a sense of urgency,” when one day she got tired of telling the three of us girls to get ready, and so she stopped. When it was time to leave she took a load of laundry and put it in the car and dumped all three of us in various stages of readiness into the car after the laundry. She then told us we had until she got to the school to be sure we were dressed, or she was leaving us at school “as is.” Well being naked at school is just a nightmare to any kid. It was amazing how quickly we were all ready to go the next day. After that, if we weren’t moving fast enough for her, all she had to do was point at the laundry basket and remark “I sure hope that you have some clothes in the dryer right now.”
A mother can get away with that kind of stuff. If a father does it, he’ll get yelled at when the mother sees the kid come home from school dressed in random clothes, “looking like nobody loves him.”