School Daze

As all things, good, bad, or indifferent, must do, this summer has come to an end.  Despite the fact that for me, work does not cease, or even slow down in the summer, I am truly a summer kind of girl.  I like sunlight, and I like the fact that the sun rises early and sets late.  I like summer sports, like swimming and water skiing, and I like summer activities that couldn't possibly be called sports, like sitting my fat bottom in a float on the lake with an icy drink and just kind of drifting.

More to the point, since one of the more important hats I wear is the one that says "Mom", in the summer there are fewer obligations.  No school events, few birthday parties, no games, rehearsals, concerts, practices, etc.  So weekends can actually be spent at leisure instead of running around like crazy people trying to juggle all those things.

The official death knell of summer is the modern phenomenon known as "Open House."  I honestly don't remember them from my own school days.   I can't say for sure they didn't happen: they may have been one of the 5,382,951 memories that have been wiped out from my mental hard drive in order to make room for the lyrics to the entire theme song from "Gilligan's Island." 

This year, for the first time, we have children in two different schools, so we got to have a marathon open house night.  First at Sharon Elementary School (Go Sharon Jaguars! Rawr!) which was familiar turf, then Loganville Middle School, which was not.  This was year 7 we've attended Sharon's opening festivities.  We knew the drill.  Go early to the cafeteria to get on line to find out about busses.  Buy this year's obligatory t-shirt from the PTO.   Pre-buy the yearbook so that you can save a few bucks.  Say hi to all the other Moms you know and even like, but don't have any idea what their name is beyond "Amanda's Mom."  Go to the class, meet the teacher, pick up the forms you have to fill out, and go home. 

This sounds relatively easy, but you forget that in an elementary school, the vast majority of people roaming the halls are under 4 feet tall.  Some of them are screaming.  Some of them are running.  None of them are moving in a straight line.  So it is easy to step on someone, knock them over, be knocked over yourself, or be completely unable to keep up with your own, shorter, more mobile family members.  I don't do well with crowds, and swirling, chaotic crowds are ten times worse.  Finally I just flattened myself up against a wall and waited for an opening.  I will give the school some credit, though.  They cranked up the heat to approximately 250 degrees and then sold cheap ice cream bars they probably bought for twenty-five cents for a dollar.  I bought four.  Way to meet that funding gap.

Then we went to the Middle School.   Had we not gone with a friend of ours who used to work at the school, there is no way we would have gotten out of there alive.  We went in the cafeteria and got the bus information.  The bus information is that my son needs to be out at the bottom of the driveway at 6:20 am.  Thank goodness he is old enough not to want his Mommy to go to the bus stop with him, because his Mommy is frankly incapable of such a thing.

We were then told to head to 'sixth grade hall'.  I don't know if my friend was just playing mind games with us, but we went through twelve miles of hallway and made no less than forty-three turns before finally arriving on a tiny little claustrophobic cul-de-sac of a hallway labeled "sixth grade hall".  I'm pretty sure I could not have gotten out the way we came if I had a compass, a map, and a Sherpa.  We said hello to my son's homeroom teacher, who handed us his schedule, which we already knew since it was on line.  Then we stood there like morons, thinking surely there was something else for us to do, but for the life of us we could not figure out what. 

I finally found a Mom I knew who had been through this before, and she said that we should 'walk' his schedule so he knew where his classes were.  I asked my son if he wanted to do that, and he said no, he would much prefer to go for pizza, as he was hungry and there were way too many people in the hallway.  Which is saying something for a boy we have nicknamed "barnacle boy" because he seems to have absolutely no need whatsoever for personal space. 

Unlike elementary school, most folks roaming the hallway during open house in middle school are at least tall enough to be seen without looking down.  But they are also bigger, and they take up more room.  The adolescent variety of human, most of whom have grown six inches or more over the last three months (boys) or find themselves wider in places they didn't used to be wide (girls), have no idea how to control their bodies, and regularly crash into you as they find out the hard way that they are no longer small enough to slip in between grownups down the hallways and get where they want to go faster.

It was hot there, too.  The middle school was selling fruit slushies. 

So here we are, off on another year's adventure full of full-frontal insanity, triple booked activities, parenting challenges, and the chance that I will no longer be capable of helping with homework.  Really, son.  I would like to help you with that algebra, but that file was deleted so that I could remember the phone number of a Chinese delivery place that closed 15 years ago.