The Bus Rush

Good Morning... or was it?  This is my first posting, on my first blog ever.  Why?  I realized this might be an easier way of sharing the joy of my daily routine with my 3 children, 4 dogs, 2 birds and 4 fish with my friends and family instead of texting my morning joy, phoning my morning pain, emailing my morning disasters, faxing my morning funnies or morse coding my daughter's 35 outfit changes before we had to be at the bus stop.  You see, by the time my coffee wears off I can't even answer about or remember any of the moments of my morning to retell them despite their seeming so important and share-worthy while they're happening.  Why?  Because I am already gearing up for the 3:30 to 6:30 afternoon witching hours when my 3 charming children crash land back home from school and I get to do it all over again.  Oh, I see you know what I'm talking about... you must have a child of your own.

This morning when my alarm rang, I did not try to smack it off my night-table because I was fortunate to have made it through the night without Remi (9) sleep walking into my room to ask me for a piece of pie, Chad (almost 8), not telling me at 3:30 a.m. that he has yet to fall asleep and can he now get up and watch TV and Eden (5) arriving in my room while the moon was high in the sky to tell me she needs to have her blanket fixed?!?  I had a full night sleep which equates to about 6 hours without seeing a child.  So I rolled out of bed (literally) and staggered to the kitchen to make coffee (how did I get through college without it?)

The bottom line here is that coffee gets me to a adequately functioning level of parenting for America.  Not sure if the European or Asian countries would concur.  In suburban Huntington it works.

This morning's delights included the following:  Remi decided it would be nice to spend the morning looking at old baby pictures of herself on the computer.  That would be fine, but it was already 8 a.m. and the bus comes at 8:45 a.m., Chad was still sleeping and  so was Eden.  Did I mention that she also wanted each picture to be accompanied by a running narrative of her life.  Did I also mention she wanted to start this process from when she was crowning in the labor and delivery room at NYU hospital.  I told her, "no."  She told me that, "I'm no fun and why don't I make time for important stuff like this?"  Huh?

Eden I have to wake up.  She's easy.  I wake her.  I pick out her outfit.  I brush her teeth, while she empties her tank.  I answer the same question each morning "Is it a school day?"  I put her hair in some form of a pony tail, bumps and all while she asks if she can wear it down.  I tell her, "that's not happening kiddo, you have lice in your class...).  I know, I just gagged writing the word lice.  That will have to be another blog entirely, but suffice it to say, We got lice the week before school started...

I'm also feeding the dogs, picking the couch pillows up off the floor, begging Chad to flatten down the back of his hair from his aggressive bed head and losing, making my bed and realizing the hard spot I kept bumping my face into all night was my ipad, redoing Remi's ponytail because it apparently had too many bumps while I was being chastised for not being able to create an inverse-french-braid-diagonal-twisting-fishtail-creation that also included the use of the "Bump It."  I'm making sure lunch boxes go into the right backpacks with the right color ice packs, that this one has snack, this one has an extra water bottle and that the other one puts her social studies book in her bag for the 300th time.  Have I clued you in that despite the temperature being a balmy 37 this morning, Chad is wearing shorts, no jacket and a light sweatshirt.  I'm waiting for the school phone call asking me where exactly my focus is when my son is getting himself out the door.  I've fed the fish, opened the shades, said hello to Rosie and Flex, Remi's two hostile love birds, dematted four dogs and managed to actually get my bra on before having to stand outside at the bus stop.

I've run a load of laundry, emptied the dishwasher (on par with unpacking groceries -- hate it,) quizzed Remi on New York's climate and what the difference between "weather" and "climate" is, beer-chugged my second cup of coffee which I kept misplacing, microwaving again and then misplacing.  I shoved vitamins down their throats while having to listen to a year old complaint about why the vitamin people stopped making pink and orange vitamins and now everyone is stuck with purple.  I took a phone call, missed three phone calls and got to the bus stop three minutes before the hulking yellow bus arced down Beck Place.

I put three kids on two different buses, stood twice on the curb waving my calm, steady wave as the bus pulled away and then triumphantly walked back to my house rejoicing that today was Friday (a reprieve from the routine) and wishing back the long days of summer!