The Real Meaning of Back to School Christmas

At the end of summer, I always feel like...

At the end of summer, I always feel like a neutered dog. I have this overwhelming groggy feeling with a huge sense that I lost an important piece of me somewhere, and I'm just sitting here asking myself, "What the fuck just happened?" 

I don't remember what summers and falls were like before kids outside of the smell of popcorn lingering across the bleachers at a high school football game while my underwear was frozen to my ass, which gave one of those gushing "It's Christmas" feelings in my chest. I love football season. I love autumn.

But now that I have kids, this is a time of year where the glory of sending them back to school is supposed to be a time to celebrate. Summer was full of days where the kids either had cabin fever stuck at home while I got things done, or we were out everywhere blowing pay checks on the cost of going to a pool, or goofy golf, or some little trip designed to amuse the children enough to cure symptoms of cabin fever like blind rage toward each other, walking on the walls, and climbing curtains literally and hope they actually fall asleep before midnight. (Note: I still have the Dora Blanket pinned up to my living room window courtesy of the children's summer redecorating program).

Anticipating the start of the school year reminds me of those days as a child when I anticipated vacation at Disney World or Christmas.

I expected this...

But then the reality of school sets in. The government isn't going to give you free babysitting for free. No. That would be too easy. You have to give them your soul for this trade.

Every year school begins, the schools start demanding a bunch of horse shit tasks of a parent that reminds them why they looked forward to summer to begin with. This year, I had the pleasure of enrolling my youngest in Pre-School. While excited that all 3 kids will be in school, finally, for the first time in my life, I was still hopping on one foot and then dancing on the other while rubbing my head and patting my belly to turn in the necessary paperwork and get the shots up to date and all the jive that comes with enrolling into school. Any time I showed the slightest amount of objection, the schools threatened not to babysit my kids for me. We all know the hardest most demanding job out there is that of a mother, so extra unnecessary tasks is what we love to add to our plate.

I wrote this one myself. Can you tell?

Then school starts and every morning in order to obtain free babysitting services, I have to get my kids there on time. On time. You might as well say, "You have to do a handstand every day with a duck's penis." I know some people are like, "That's not that hard," and duck's penis is not, but when it comes to parenting, those people either don't have kids or they only have like one kid and a bunch of supportive adults helping them. That's ok if you do get help, but you lose the high horse with that. I assure you when it's one woman doing all the work to get 3 kids somewhere, anywhere, "on time" is just not an option. But the schools mandate that we grow this tail out of our ass and defy the basic laws of physics.

One of my infamous excuse reasons on the sign in sheet at school describes what happens every morning with these kids. I'm willing to bet it went over most educators' heads because irony... The centripetal force of my kids is so strong it increased earth's gravitational pull [at our location] thereby slowing down time for us. That's precisely what happens on a metaphorical level, and possibly on a physical literal one as well. Time is relative, meaning it depends on where you are. It's so possible this is what happened to that hour that time you were wiping a butt one minute and then you moved onto finding shoes and you know that did not just take an hour to do, but according to the clock, yes it did.

I honestly suggest looking up the science to what I just said so you can teach it to your kids since the schools won't. And if you didn't click on duck penis earlier, you should. That's biology your kid won't learn at school.

Time Dilation for Dummies
Gravitational Time Dilation on Wikipedia


Common morning experiences getting kids ready for school... At least for me...

• all 3 kids decide they can't dress themselves
• they want to wear different shirt
• they won't wear anything but the dirty pink dress with a gaping hole in the arm pit
• they want to pack a lunch last second
• they can't find their homework
• nobody can find a matching shoe for the life of them (it's usually in the car)
• you forgot to make them take a bath the night before and you can tell by smell they aren't wiping right
• 2 of 3 kids refuse to let you brush their hair, so you chase them like a game of tag tricking them for each hair brush swipe before saying "fuck it go with bed head." 
• There's a pile of mysterious ketchup on the backpack
• The PreK kid's folder is covered, inside and out, in sticky wetness which requires the use of Fantastick and you just read in the 1st grader's folder that you have to fill out this form and turn it in that day and the 3rd grader isn't sure if she even brought her folder home
• You see an advertisement for Picture day and have a mini-heart attack that today could be that day before you realize it was last month or it's not until next week. This happens every day.
• You realize how messy your house is and find yourself uncontrollably cleaning a little or throwing in a quick load of laundry on your way out the door 
• You realize, usually about the time you are looking for your car keys, that you are wearing the same clothes you wore yesterday and the school might notice. Then you ponder about the costs and benefits to brushing your teeth as you change your shirt and hope nobody pays attention to pants. 
• You give 3 kids a shower at once, dry them off at once, dress them at once, find clothes and shoes for 3 kids at once, brush hair at once while they are asking things like, "Why does the color blue look blue?" and "Solma won't stop looking at me!" and "I want to take my fluffy unicorn to school with me, where is it?" It's really the mindfuck of all mindfucks.
• After 25 minutes of looking, you found the spare keys (nevermind the actual set you usually use) in a toy box in the closet in the kids' room. 
• You get everyone to the car for the first time, and one of them has to pee, they forgot something in the house, all now have to pee, or someone pees their pants, or falls into a mud puddle, or sits on an old milkshake your husband left in the car. 
• The second time you get everyone back into the car, the seat belt buckle won't buckle. She's in the front seat it's my turn to sit in the front. The Pre-K kid now wants to sit in the front knowing she's not allowed to. Someone wants to go in through the window instead of the door. The 3rd grader leaves the car to look at the rocks because we are taking too long.
• We start driving to school, FINALLY, and oh shit, I forgot my purse. I need the ID to get into the school building to drop of Pre-K kid. Turn around.
• Run in the house to get ID, and put all 3 kids back into the car because I took too long, which is any time longer than it takes for them to unbuckle themselves and "make themselves comfortable." 
• Show up 5 minutes late and deal with all the dirty glares from teachers and secretaries like I obviously just tarred and feathered my kids in the name of bad parenting. They do look at my kids with pity like, "Those poor kids have such a fucked-up mother." 

Dear teachers, can we not make this deal?

No seriously, I won't care that you gave my Gabby Logan's artwork in her folder if you promise not to care that her homework is covered in pancake syrup. I won't care that you give me my Gabby all hyper at the end of the day because you had her sitting still for most of it following absurd rules you made up for a false sense of control if you don't care that I do the exact opposite for cognitive growth and healthy psychological sense of trust, especially since I have no choice because you hogged all the quiet sit still time she could possibly give in a day. 

So by the time I actually get to school and drop them off, it's like I just left my stomach and working brain behind because it goes from complete chaos to complete peace in point five. It's so extreme it leaves me a state of blah for most of the day, too much so that I can't actually enjoy the few hours without the kids. The blah even smothers out the guilt of being late, or leaving a head unbrushed, or sending a kid with a lunch box full of marshmallows and fruit snacks, or a kid wearing black sweatpants with a navy blue top and sparkling pink slippers over stained, unmatching white socks. It doesn't really go away until I sleep it off all night, and the next morning, between the first cup of caffeine and the moment I have to wake up the kids for school, I feel human.

Then on top of it, schools are a melting pot of cooties like a hospital nobody disinfected. Yes kids have cooties. Lots of fucking cooties. And we herd them all into a school environment where it is managed, at best, with the occasional use of Clorox Cleanup Wipes. Kids can handle most cooties as their immune systems are developing and battling the germs like no other, but my immune system is old and set in its ways. It doesn't know what the fuck to do with all these germs, so every school year, I get sick. Usually within the first week of school, I'm sick, and I continue to be sick all year round, catching something new about the time I'm getting over something else.

So everything I just described, I generally do it with a sinus-induced migraine, sneezes, snot running out of my nose into my mouth while I'm trying to squeeze a kid into the wrong pair of pants.

Basically, at the end of summer, I feel blah. Numbing blah where I'm identifying what I'm looking at consciously, you know, like computer. That's a computer. TV, the noise is the TV. Dinner, that's something I have to make isn't it?

P.S. If you really think kids go to school to get educated, LOL you are naive. It's been nothing more than a free babysitting service provided by the government for decades. Check America out in how well we compare, in education, with other countries. They are not getting "educated." They are getting "conformed." I'm also not a hippy. I'm just not a sheeple. I'm the type of person who throws away the science textbook so I can read Einstein's notes. I'm such a rebel. No actually I had good teachers who didn't follow curriculum when I was a kid.

P.P.S. This is a blog post about MY FEELINGS. If you decided it was an invite to knock my parenting because you're so perfect (which you are not, you probably suck that bad-parenting cock down better than I ever could), I'm probably going to publicly humiliate you in several places.

For more Finish the Sentence Friday, check out the link-up on Finding Ninee

My Back to School To Do List...

Your words are: 

genius ~ stupidity ~ brain ~ science ~ art ~ insanity

They were submitted by: http://thesadderbutwisergirl.com    

It's almost time for my kids to go back to school. I have almost a weekend in between now and the first day of school. I just read Jen Mann's thought-provoking post about things she found on Pinterest to do before school starts and reasons they suck, and now I feel like I just woke up 2 hours after I was supposed to be at work, and I'm asking myself, "What the fuck happened to my alarm clock?"

What did happen to it? I swear I set that alarm for the end of July. When did August get here? Why didn't I get a memo about August? 

Now anyone who reads my blog knows I'm not a June Cleaver Pinterest-Perfect mom on my best day, and there are many other moms who are on board with me on this, "that's bull shit" bandwagon much like Jen Mann's post I mentioned above. I thought June Cleaver was the kind of mom I was going to be back in my young, naive stupidity days before motherhood, but my experiences have led me to believe one of the following occurs with perfect parents out there otherwise known as the June Cleavers:

1. They are faking it. They don't do half the shit they claim to do.

2. They are neglecting their kid in the name of doing everything for their kid. 

3. They only have one kid, and an army of adults to help them care for that one kid. 

4. They aren't human. They are aliens plotting to destroy the earth with Mount Fuji High expectations designed to create overworked, sleep-deprived slave parent drones for future abductions.   

Mind you, I'm totes aware that half of my obstacles with parenting was the fact that I had 3 girls, back to back. It's a different ball game with kids that close in age. So knowing this about me, this is my to-do list for school. This is the survival guide of the fittest. It is not someone faking it. It won't neglect your kids to where you are screaming, "STOP FIGHTING" as they are pounding each others faces while you are desperately looking at a clothing tag for the size as you are sorting for what to donate...

1. Enroll the kids who are not automatically enrolled.

In my case, this is the Pre-K. The last kid. This I started in March. The day they opened pre-k registration, I camped out at the school around 3AM waiting for 7AM. There were already 5 other mothers camping with me. It's the only free pre-school, and the only pre-school that operates more than 3 hours a day, 3 days a week, in a 10 mile high-traffic radius, and it only has room for like 5 kids who aren't Head Start. Now I know some moms don't mind driving 20 minutes or a half hour to get their kid to school, but try getting 3 kids to two schools 30 minutes apart at the same time.

Then last week, I got a call from the school demanding the immunization records and birth certificate or the kid doesn't get to go. She said it in a threatening manner just like that too. The immunizations, I got what I could faxed. Now the birth certificate, they want one from the state, not the one they give you when you give birth, so the one I have isn't good enough. So I drove all 3 of my kids an hour one way to the state Capitol, got the piece of paper waiting in a long line with 3 kids, drove back without stopping to shop, and gave the school the piece of paper.

2. Do some laundry.

You don't have to do all the laundry. I mean what kind of life would you have if your laundry was caught up? Ha. No, just make sure you have a good week's worth of clean clothes for the kids. When it comes to things like getting laundry caught up and sorting through clothes packing away summer clothes, giving away out-grown clothes, washing winter coats... Do all that other shit while they are at school. You'll be more productive if you don't have them tugging on your leg every 30 seconds. I feel like the Pinterest Genius with my, "Wait until AFTER school starts," like duh!

3. "Sew" Clothes

I know this sounds Pinterest, but it's not. My kids have a lot of holes on the knees of their pants, those stretchy leg warmer pants we wear under skirts and long shirts that you can wear all year. That's most of what they wear. So I went to Walmart and got fabric swatches that were cheap and cool looking, and fabric glue. I glued those SOB's over the holes on the insides of the pants. I did the iron-on glue. The hardest part was not gluing the pants together or getting cardboard on the glue from in between. Next round, I'm trying parchment paper in between the pants. I did this on the living room floor while watching Netflix after the kids went to bed.

4. Shop back to school items

I still have to shop some back to school clothes, something we don't normally do until mid-fall for sales, better clothing options as winter gear isn't really out in August, and more money (I always seem to be waiting for some big check around September). But the things we do get before school starts...

• Backpacks.
• Back-up Backpacks (cheap ugly ones on sale) because my kids won't go to school without one, and they are so young they don't really need one.
• Art shit by Crayola so they have the false sense of getting back to school supplies they don't need because the school supplies that shit. Don't worry, they'll play with them, lose them, and break them before school starts. It was just for fun.
• Folders. The school provides a folder, but they expect you to clean it out daily. Psssht. As if I have no life right? Get a folder for the backpack designed to move the school papers over to that folder. Teach your kid to do it.
• Shoes. This the mother-in-law does. But shoes are important because they ruin all their shoes in the summer.

5. Paper Bin for each kid.

You don't want to keep this where the kids can find it or reach it, but you want a bin for each kid to throw the papers you don't throw away. The art work. Some of the hand-writing if you do what I do... I once tried one of those little wall hanging things. They are still up there with kid names on it. No, you fill it up too fast. The schools hate trees and are trying to kill all the rainforests with the amount of paper they send home. I also tried a file in the filing cabinet. Again, I was thinking too small. You need a real bin, like something that can hold a comforter.

What I did one year, and will do again this year... When my oldest finished first grade, I grabbed a stack of her papers from school with her handwriting, and I turned it into a font. I want to do that with all my kids. I might write a how-to some day, or provide it as a paid service maybe... The artwork is also going to be a font that I shall call Refrigerator Art.

This year, I'm also thinking of seeing how annoying it is to recycle paper for all the girl scouts ads, parenting magazines, nutrition sheets, fundraisers and 3 page papers about field trips.


This is about it.

The sleep schedule? That will happen on its own, and it's easier to just let the school day do it for you because the activity they do at school, you can never mimic it at home because you don't have all the kids the school has. The socializing wears them down more than playing outside, and you need that in order to get them to actually fall asleep before 10 PM. For those who make their kids lay down at 9PM and yell at them to go to sleep until midnight, seriously, stop stressing about it.

In fact, just about everything you can possibly think to do you should wait until school starts and you have all those hours to yourself to do them. Now my

AFTER SCHOOL STARTS THINGS TO DO

1. Clean the house
2. Shampoo carpets
3. Sort through clothes prepping for winter
4. Type things in Google Calendar as the kids bring home school stuff
5. Teach science since the schools don't anymore for my kids' age. We have a microscope and telescope now.
6. Find my brain I lost this summer.
7. Get the flu shots because the schools are filled with mini-assassins trying to kill you with germs, just like they did with the Indians.
8. Lysol the classroom when teachers aren't looking because number 7.
9. Prep house for flu season disinfection
10. Fuck my husband

Embrace the peace of having the day to yourself, and the insanity school makes you pay for it. Don't volunteer for anything.

Links to the other “Use Your Words” posts:

http://Bakinginatornado.com                                       Baking In A Tornado

http://spatulasonparade.blogspot.com/                          Spatulas on Parade

http://themomisodes.com                                      The Momisodes

http://thethreegerbers.blogspot.ch/               Confessions of a part-time working mom

http://www.JuiceboxConfession.com                             Juicebox Confession

http://www.eviljoyspeaks.wordpress.com                 Evil Joy Speaks

http://followmehome.shellybean.com                   Follow me home . . .

http://www.someoneelsesgenius.com                       Someone Else’s Genius

http://www.crumpetsandbollocks.com                       Crumpets and Bollocks

http://stacysewsandschools.blogspot.com/                      Stacy Sews and Schools 

http://berghamchronicles.blogspot.com              The Bergham’s Life Chronicles

http://thesadderbutwisergirl.com                       The Sadder But Wiser Girl

Also Check out Abandoning Pretense and Why She's Not Ready to go Back to School.