Morning notes

By 7:25 this morning I realized that we were going to be late getting the kids off to school. Rather than upping the level of stress to try to hustle them out the door on time, I decided to embrace the lateness. We did not dawdle, but we did not scramble either. I even did two rounds of driving kids to school. Kiki and Link were each about 5 minutes late. Patch and Gleek were about 30 minutes late. I wrote notes to excuse the tardies. We can’t make a habit of it, but it was the right call for this morning.

Part of the reason for the lateness was the laundry crisis. We had reached a state where there were huge piles of clean clothes, but no one could find anything because all the baskets had overflowed into one another. We also had piles of dirty clothes and completely empty drawers and closets. Usually the kids do not pay much attention to laundry, but without me doing it, they have started to notice. Just yesterday Gleek lamented that she had no clean clothes because no one was doing laundry. Apparently they’ll eventually notice when the clean clothes stop magically appearing for them. I spent some time this morning segregating the laundry into the correct baskets. This afternoon I will require the kids to put their clothes away.

Also contributing to the lateness this morning was the urgent need for me to write notes to teachers about class placements for next year. The end of April is when those placement meetings are held. I long ago learned that the best way to get my kids placed where I think they need to be is to speak with the teacher just prior to the class placement meetings. I missed it last year. I didn’t want to miss it again. The notes have been written and delivered. It is good to be putting parenting stuff ahead of business stuff for one morning. But now I need to get to work.

Note: You know you’ve been doing too much editing when you say something and your brain supplies an image of where the commas should go into the sentence you just spoke.