Ten more hours, but who’s counting?
Posted on January 14, 2008
Filed Under kids, parenting, suburban joys, Judd Nelson from The Breakfast Club, bitching and moaning, cheer |
Before first light there is the shushing quiet that is snow at dawn. I’m thirty four years old and the winter landscape, sugar coated trees and drifts of snowflakes across the lawn at sunrise, still takes my breath away. That quiet peaceful beginning was, unfortunately, not any indication of the day to come.
I suppose I am thankful that the superintendent had the foresight to call classes the night before. There was no mad dash down to the kitchen at 6 a.m. to see if the school left a message on our voice mail as to delayed starts or cancellation. But now, there is the doubt. Was the cancellation premature, made in the anticipation of a projected storm path? I’m not sure that 6 inches on the ground at 9 a.m. is necessarily treacherous conditions. It seems that school could have gone on but then that’s me talking from the other side of 11 a.m. when the children have tired of board games and books and cocoa. This is after my attempt to shift their focus out of doors, into the wonderland of ice and snow drifts, became abject failure.
We prepared for the outing with the requisite Where are my gloves? and My snow pants feel too tight, followed by kicking around on the floor trying to remove offending snow pants and tearing a hole in the fanny seam. And then there was a cry of I can only find one boot, which resulted in the removal of every last thing from the mudroom closet before the missing boot could be located beneath a new jumbo pack of paper towels. And then there was the small protest that amounted to I hate my hat because it makes me look like a baby, that inspired tears and an eventual compromise, Yes, you can wear the orange face mask that makes you look like you just robbed a 7-Eleven because I think the tell tale gap that was your front teeth actually helps to underscore the fact that you are a six year old not a dangerous criminal.
It was 10:13 a.m. and I was exhausted and skating the brink of my patience before we had even made a footprint in the pure white snow. The kids and dog bounded around in the frothiness for a few minutes, let me fire off a few pictures that will allow us to lie to ourselves in the future and look back on the day as a joyful success and, then, the whining began. Before I could even shovel off the back steps there were surly complaints and snow balls hurled and a steady drone became a constant begging to go back inside the house which was, just a few seconds before, “The Most Boring-est Place In The Entire World.”
And so we trudged back to the door, wrestled it open against the weight of the wind and tumbled back inside to remove the hats and the gloves and the boots and the snow pants. We heaped our outer wear on the radiator. Our sock feet stamped through pools of melting snow on the floor. The dog dashed to the living room and shook frigid dampness all over the carpet and the couch.
My oldest child, leaning against the door jamb between the living room and hallway, watching me towel off the rug, said, in the jaded, tired-of-life tone he’s recently perfected, “It’s 10:32 a.m. and I’ve got nothing to do.”
And I mumbled, “Only ten more hours of nothingness to go, but who’s counting?”
Comments
WordPress database error: [Can't open file: 'wp_comments.MYI' (errno: 144)]
SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = '385' AND comment_approved = '1' ORDER BY comment_date
Leave a Reply
