Back to School, Island Family Style

It’s official. Eighty percent of our family is now back at school.

Naturally, not much about the first day went according to The Plan I painstakingly detailed in The Land of My Mind.

The night before school started, for instance, the garbage disposal clogged, impertinent enough to reject the straw I someone inadvertently put in it. When LCB attempted to rectify my the mistake, I suddenly heard two loud, umm…sounds. One came from the sink. The other came from LCB. Water was everywhere.

The sink itself had detached from the countertop and fallen to the bottom of the cabinet.

Naturally, as this involved LCB, we had to spend two hours of our evening discussing the best plan of attack for fixing the sink. LCB maintained that, given how busy he’d been lately, it made sense to call a professional. But then we invested so much time in discussing the situation and what he would do if he were to fix it himself (hypothetically speaking), that he finally decided to go ahead and fix it himself since he had already put so much time into the whole project.

This is the person I make most major decisions with.

Then, he managed to get called out of town suddenly and unexpectedly before he had time to finish, so this was the sink I had to make do with the first few days of school.

So anyway.

I also did not get up 40 minutes early to exercise. I’m not sure if I mentioned this earlier, but my plan was to exercise every morning before everyone woke up. This, I realized, will never, ever, ever happen. Not even once.

Everything did run very smoothly, however, in the pre-dawn hours of preparing for our first day of school.

And then the small people got up.

So you can imagine where it all went from there.

It’s hard to imagine how the following picture could be more staged and totally non-representative of the moment.

Nothing about this moment was remotely serene. Despite having enough foresight to have my daughter plan ahead what she wanted do with her hair for the first day of school, I forgot to allow for a last-minute change of heart on her part. So, of course there was one. While I was not-so-calmly explaining to her that her mother is not a hair professional and would not be able to bring her new personal “vision” for her hair to fruition, the boys somehow forgot that they were supposed to be readying themselves for school and began building Legos.

Thus, our final moments before walking out the door involved Baby-girl trying not to cry the tears of a dream deferred and her mother trying not to break into her high-pitched hysterical morning routine while the men of the family all stood quietly by, strangely impervious to how far the morning’s events had deviated from The Plan.

Ah, well. Not to worry. The Plan for next year is already being formulated in The Land of My Mind.

6 Replies to “Back to School, Island Family Style”

  1. Feeling your pain! I’d like to say it gets easier as the school year goes on, but we both know that’s just not true ;). Hang in there – it’s Friday!

    1. Sorry you’re feeling it too, but thanks. And I know; I was just putting together a major writing assigment this morning and thinking about how I’m going to feel once all the papers come in waiting to be graded – ugh! But yes, it is Friday. Hallelujiah.

  2. Oh those mornings were made to test us I think. Last minute change of heart, lost school sports gear, forgotten homework…it all happens as you need to be leaving the house. My two are back to school on the 30th August. Already I seem to have mislaid one schoolbook…I put it away somewhere safe and now I can’t find it!! 😉

    1. Oh, we’ve done the schoolbook and library book thing several times. And of course, my personal favorite is the homework left on the desk that never makes it into their backpacks. Pre-children, I used to wonder how my students managed to leave their stuff at home so frequently. Now I know full-well exactly how it happens. 🙂

  3. Well, I guess that is one reason to have a drop in and not an undermount sink. Hope you can reuse the clips that it fell out of.

    The Cub starts school on September 6th. We received teacher assignments on the 15th, so all of the Moms in my MOMs Club and that we know around here are comparing notes on who has which teacher and what is known about them. The Cub’s Kindergarten teacher’s son is in his 1st grade class, and she seems to have had a hand in that, so it should be a good year for my soon to be 1st Grader.

    Hope your mornings morph into a smoother routine.

    1. I don’t know what he was able to reuse. Frankly, I just tried to stay out of the way. But he did mention that it looked like it wasn’t installed correctly in the first place.

      I always breathe a sigh of relief when I find out my kids have good teachers, because it makes such a difference, especially if they are with the same one most of the day. I’m glad it sounds like The Cub will be in good hands.

      Thanks. They are starting to smooth themselves out. 🙂

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