Well, from where I stand, which is at the kitchen counter at 6:35 in the morning, it's an auspicious start. Granted, Jake got up and interpreted "Hang around upstairs and help move Bot along" to mean "Be too dumb to pee before waking the kids and then, when they're awake and using up both upstairs bathrooms, go all the way downstairs to pee so that by the time you slowly make your way back upstairs Bot probably already skipped brushing his teeth and is ten minutes behind" but at least I thought to tell him that if he's going to go all the way downstairs he might as well put Bot's oatmeal in the microwave so it's done when they come down. Liam came down looking for socks because "get everything you need for the morning as far as clothing goes" is generally interpreted as "everything you might already have upstairs is good enough until you get dressed in the morning and realize you're missing something." Richard, when I told him last night to go find the basket with the neatly folded white polo uniform shirts, asking Cory where the basket was if necessary, and pick one about three shirts down because that would be his size, picked instead a winter turtleneck in Liam's size crumpled up in a pile, not a basket, of all winter stuff that had no hope of having a "three shirts down." When he came down to the second floor so clothed in wrinkled, long-sleeved knit polyester from his ears to his knees, and my eyes got wide, Jake did the most useful thing he did all morning besides walking them to the bus stop, which was to quietly tell me, "Let's keep it positive, keep it positive, we're getting him the right shirt, it's OK..." So I wanted to throw a fit, but didn't. Jake then took this calm demeanor to the kitchen where he stopped Bot, the slowest eater of the bunch, to give him a shoelace-tying lesson. Yes, at 6:15 in the morning, when Bot hasn't seen 6:15 since early June. I'm sure he learned a lot. Liam then made a "what? I was just sayin'..." comment about how it's interesting that Bot should learn shoe-tying late when Liam learned how to tie his laces early, to which Bot self-consciously started to say, "Be quiet, Liam!" before I shushed Liam and whispered that there is no Freivald mythology in which he was an early shoe-tie-er (tyer? Tier? Tire?) anyway. Liam claimed innocent befuddlement over what he possibly could have done wrong, making such a comment to the touchiest, most self-conscious, tear-prone kid awake at 6:15, and then followed Jake's cheerful pointing out the Bot had a plumber's crack and should pull up his shorts with, "Yeah, he's always showing his butt when he bends--" before I whispered that he was simply not to speak to his brother until lunch, and if he made him cry before school he was in trouble and don't worry about telling me why he's innocent, just be quiet.
The kids and even Mom were cheerful at the door, where they posed for pictures, and the bus showed up at not too far off its appointed time--6:47am--so Jake wasn't left waiting forever down the block. Now, Garrett is woken up but is relatively quiet under threat of doing math sheets if he's loud, there might be a little kids awake but they have yet to figure out we're up and downstairs, I'm emailing, and Jake is chortling over Ann Coulter's latest column and it's just about 7am. Other than the fact that we're up and Mark is still asleep (jerk), it's not a bad morning so far.
We'll see how tomorrow goes--Garrett starts but does not yet have a bus pass, and neither does Alex, who starts on Monday, and dealing with the lady at Transportation in the district is always fun exercise of her telling me she can't do anything and me knowing she CAN if I can just say the right things to not piss her off but make her feel that spending a couple minutes now fixing the issue is better than putting me off and having to deal with me later, and both Alex and Duncan still claim they are not going to kindergarten or preschool (though I bet if I switched them, Alex would be fine with going to preschool and Dunc would walk into a class in which he's too young to be in, just like he happily wanted to stay last year in the very class he refuses to go to this year--once I get them in the school, slowly getting them to the proper location within the school should be no problem, right?)
Dunc's stomping down the stairs--we're discovered, and the party is over.
