It’s the last 10 minutes of the morning that make a difference. It doesn’t matter whether I’ve dragged my sorry carcass out of bed at a (relatively) reasonable time and then spent the next half hour trying to get the various krakens of the house to awake, or woken up at 3am to have ‘everything ready’ before their precious little selves jump out of bed with sheer joie de vivre and beg for it to be a school day (hahahahaha), it still comes down to that last 10 minutes.
It seems to me that I must have the record for the number of late notes per week. Although now I am getting sneaky, and have refreshed the skills I had honed in highschool of how to get into school as late as possible without actually needing a late note (ie, after the roll call has been sent to the office). Heck, in Highschool I was so good that I knew to intercept the poor schmuck it was to take the roll call list to the principals office, and scrub my name from the list just before it got delivered. I was /good/ then. I am /incredible/ now. I know every rat-run, every unlocked gate. I know how to sneak through the school hall, how to knock on the library door (dear old librarians, always willing to help, never too sure of exactly whats going on). I can even get through doors that need electronic tags to get through… oh, you do need to lie, but that’s better than having to face Geraldine at the front desk and explain to her whilst she tut-tuts why you are late /this time/ especially since you’ve turned up so many times, she says “Again?” as soon as you walk through her doors.
I wonder how the Perfect Mums do it. The Perfect Mums arrive at school at precisely the right time to allow their tribe of sproglets (and its always a tribe with Perfect Mums, its never just one or two) to run off and play with their friends (the children of other perfect mums) whilst they can catch up on the gossip de jour with the other perfect mums. They always arrive at school perfectly presented, their hair up and in some fancy and impossible-to-do-yourself-if you’ve-only-two arms style if long , or otherwise freshly blowdried, styled and sprayed to withstand an F5 tornado if shorter. Their makeup is immaculate and they are wearing skirts, stockings and high heel shoes as they deliver their spotless, clean, and ironed-with-creases-so-sharp-you-could-cut-yourself sprogs in their giant, and yet clean, waxed, and polished, 4wheel drives, the type that wouldn’t have had half a wheel accidently slip over onto an imacculately manicured lawn, let alone go /properly/ off-road and like, get a splash of mud on the undercarriage or dead insect guts on the winsdcreen. You won’t want to let a small blemish from Real Life to sully the spotless Tupperwear or Mary Kay stickers.
Me, I arrive at school panting, yelling at my scruffy, unironed monster with chronic birdsnest hair and vegemite smeared across his forehead. The vegemite was not from the toast he asked for, I made, and he refused to eat, because the dog eventually ate that toast (despite not being allowed in the house before school). The vegemite was from the second batch of toast I made, because he cried when the dog ate the first batch of toast. Its not like he ate the second batch of toast either, but did manage to rip it from the dog’s mouth and thus smacked himself in the forehead with said toast and then cried about the dog hitting him in the head with his own toast-infested hand. The dog, for her part, did her best to look innocent, whilst busily drooling vegemite tainted slobber across the floor.
But the toast, I’ve come to expect. It’s normal, its (almost) predictable, and therefore can be taking Into Account when trying to estimate the time needed to Get Ready For School. Dressing The Child, otherwise known as Evil Incarnate, is the challenge. Not only must one know exactly what day it is on the school calendar, which needs a PDA to keep track of. One also needs to find the Appropriate Clothing for That Day (formal uniform, casual uniform, sports uniform, summer uniform, winter uniform, mufti day, theme day). Which generally means said clothes should be washed, dried, ironed, and put away before they need to be found. Except that they are usually lurking in what I kindly refer to as the Chair of Horror – which is the pile of laundered clothing that needs to be sorted, folded, and put away (this homey don’t iron). For some reason, the monster that is the Chair of Horror can never be slayed, and even if it temporarily brought down, it just resurrects itself back to its full level of horror within a matter of days. Still, the lovely pile of clean, fresh clothes on the chair does make a lovely place for the dog to sleep, shed, fart and drool vegemite-tainted slobber, especially since she’s strictly NOT ALLOWED on the furniture..
Except of course when said clothes aren’t lurking in the chair of horror, they are still lurking in the Basket of Evil, also known as the dirty laundry. This usually happens when I’ve missed The Note Home. The Note Home tells parents, among other things, of variations to the normal timetable of Days. So that instead of having a Formal Winter Uniform Thursday, they are having a sports carnival that day, so please send Child to school in their Winter Sports Uniform on Thursday as well as the usual ‘PE day’ on Wednesday. However, they also expect a 6 year old boy, with the attention span of a deranged gnat, to inform his parents that he has A Note Home. Or, even if he does remember, to remember sometime before the morning of the Sports Carnival when the sports uniform is still in the Basket of Evil, still caked in mud, because Evil Incarnate missed the bus home on Wednesday and walked home in the rain, carefully and thoroughly inspecting in that peculiarly 6 year old boy way every damn puddle along the way.
Finding The Note sometime before the actual event and knowing when one has been caught out is One Thing. One can always send a note to school explaining why Evil Incarnate is wearing his $5 Kmart made-in-China-by-slave-labour quality tracksuit rather than his Winter Sports Uniform $78 microfibre “excercise clothing” with breathable lining (probably also made-in-China-by-slave-labour). He will whinge and complain that he’s out of uniform, but at least its covered. And if you miss The Note Home entirely, and he goes to school without the Correct Uniform for that day, you can at least hand-on-heart and conscience-clear say that you truly didn’t know about it. It’s the scrunched up, soggy, unreadable notes that are always the most fun, especially when the interrogation of the Evil Incarnate about what the paper-mache that was previously A Note Home was all about yields something about Dinosaurs, that Thomas’s farts smell (really? Thanks for sharing) and Miss O, his teacher needs “sixty trillion monies” for tomorrow. Invariably, upon hearing this, the natural reaction is to ring the school office to find out what the hell is going on, but you’ll know that Geraldine will answer the phone – if its not a microsecond past 3pm when the office shuts of course – and she wouldn’t even know if she was still breathing, let alone what Kinder “Giraffe” has scheduled tomorrow and whether it needs “sixty trillion monies” to fund it. One simply has to guess at the translation of what ‘sixty trillion monies’ means in 6 year old, throw in a bit extra just to be safe, and hope for the best.
(As a little aside, I really can’t see why schools that charge school fees can’t just put their school fees up by a couple of hundred dollars a student rather than expecting parents to bust their guts trying to shake down their friends and relatives for money throughout the year. And if there are excursions and materials that need to be paid for throughout the year, why can’t, again, those extra costs be added to the school fees too at the start of the year. If they don’t know the exact amount, then make an honest estimate, add 10%, and the difference (if any) is to be considered ‘a donation’. Really, is it that hard? And if they can accept electronic funds transfer payments for the school fees, why can’t they accept electronics funds transfer for the rest of the piddly little bits of money they require –at gruesomely short notice – throughout the year. Do they really expect a 6 year old to be able to handle $4.35 in coins? “exact money please – change only given at office” What a beautiful scam – you can either send your darling sprog off with $4.35 in coins and hope it all gets there, or you can go pay the $4.35 at the office (hours 10am –3pm Monday to Friday, fat lot of use to anyone who works for a living) or you can send a fiver and be charged a 65 cent fee for convenience. In other places it would be called ‘extortion’, here its ‘excursion money’ and woe betide if you don’t actually pay up)
I have been, by this time, screaming ‘HURRY UP’ for over an hour otherwise Evil Incarnate would simply wander around in a vague haze and feed his school hat to the dog. Its not as good as socks, at least, not as good as socks to the dog (she prefers blue socks, the sort of blue that is a) the required uniform b)is not the bog-standard sort of blue that every department store around the world sells in bulk-packs of 12 pairs for $5, and therefore c) had to be bought from the school shop at a hideous price of $5 a pair), but the dog will take at least a perfunctory chew at anything the Evil Incarante offers her, and will chew just enough that I can’t be arsed to patch up the hat and have to go buy a new one. It’s the end of term 3 of his first year of school, and so far we’re averaging one hat per term. At $35 each ($5 for the hat, $30 for the school imprint on it) by my calculations, and on the assumption he’ll make it to year 12 before I kill him, that will be $1820 I’ll spend on school hats alone during his illustrious career as a schoolboy.
After finding two special blue socks that match (I swear the school shop changes sock brands every week just so that you can never match last week’s odd sock to this week’s odd sock) that don’t have special doggy teeth marks in them (or at least, the teeth marks are in places where the holes won’t show) shoes should then naturally follow. Alas, in our house, shoes are rather more like a special adventure. There are 3 types of school uniform shoes. There’s formal shoes, there’s sports shoes, and there’s casual shoes (ie, Mufti shoes).The right shoes have to go with the right uniform. To make sure we could cope, my husband and I installed large box right next to the front door and developed a strict policy that All Shoes should be placed in The Box By The Door. This ingenious solution means that we have improved our shoe finding success by 50%. Per pair. I would blame the dog for placing the other shoe in occultic and eldritch locations, but really, its just Evil Incarnate kicking off his shoes any which way. The Child is questioned about the last known whereabouts of the fugitive shoe, but he sticks to his guns and swears blind he knows nothing (which is more or less true, except about Ben 10 and farts, at which he is an expert at both) And thus the Mad Morning Shoe Hunt is invoked, and the householders (including the dog) go into a frenzy, searching behind the sofa, in wardrobes and cupboards, and even looking under things (the other occupants in the hosue are male, after all). Most often the errant shoe is found just as the other makes a quiet getaway, although sometimes the hunting takes on a kind of quiet desperation, and this is the point in time I know that whatever else goes through Evil Incarnate’s head, he is excellent and playing ‘echo’. There’s only one round of harmony, though, because when I catch him saying “Fuck fuck fuckity fuck” in time along with me, I tend to Do My Nut.
Mummies are not meant to explode. Its OK, acceptable even, for Dads to start at Full Roar and get Louder, but Mummies, or at least Good Catholic Mummies, are supposed to be the paragon of patience, virtue, of saintly meek and mildness. I know Jesus was supposed to be perfect, but Mary did not have to get his six year old Self off to school in the correct uniform, with the right shoes, with the readers done and signed off, the note read, understood, and the money – with the exact change – given and a beautiful cut lunch that will pass the Lunch Box Nazi’s inspection (yes, we have lunch box inspectors to ensure that sprogs don’t have Junk in their lunchbox. It is Not Allowed. We don’t want to compete with the canteen, now do we?) by 8:25am and then get herself off to The Meeting With Satan aka The CEO of the Coorporation at 9am, did she? And perhaps even if she did, her blessed child's extreme far-better-than-the best-three-year-old-I-don’t-want-to-go-to-bed-because-I’m-NOT-TIRED tanty would probably been quietly dropped from the Canonical gospels anyway.
Still, a good lob of a Mummy Wobbly often works, and we may actually get Evil Incarnate off to school on time, or at least, before the prayer finishes and they walk into the classroom, else sneaking in often saves our bacon.
However nothing, not even the Mum-has-gone-absolutely-batshit-mental screaming, will get us there on time (or at least not-too-late-to-sneak-in and therefore have to be Tut Tutted by Geraldine again) if the last, most reliable, most damaging incendiary is deployed. It is only four words, and is guaranteed to ruin even the best, most well planned, the got-up-at-3am to cook a nutritious, balanced 3 course breakfast, ironed the clothes, found the shoes, did the readers, broke into the change jar to pay for the excursion sort of morning. The timing has to be spot on, or Mummy will sacrifice her own breakfast to get around whatever delay happened to pop up (note to self: buying Maccas via the drive-thru on the way to work to replace the breakfast that was skipped because of an Evil Incarnate delaying tactic will not lose you any weight.). Between 8:05 (when the school bus leaves) and 8:15 (the latest I can drive him to school without having to see Geraldine) he will triumphantly declare:
“I need to poo”
I will of course ask, as I always do, although I already know the answer:
“Can you wait till you get to school?”.
To which the inevitable response, whilst he’s already managed to whip his shoes, pants and undies off and is running, butt wobbling cutely, to the toilet is:
“No!”
And so I have to wait for him to finish doing a poo. If it was simply waiting for him to emerge from the smallest room of the house, butt wiped, undies, pants & shoes restored to their traditional locations, and ready to go, I would simply go and get myself a coffee, sit down, flick the TV on to one of those mind-numbing morning shows and relax for the half hour it takes for his bowels to do what they have to do. I wouldn’t care that his one motion a day needs exactly however much toilet paper was left on the roll, be it a fresh new roll, or down to the last few sheets, nor would I mind that whilst he’s in there, he’s probably eating the vegemite toast he stashed behind the toilet three months ago. I was even faintly amused the first hundred or so times I heard him yelling “target”, “bombs away!” and then “a direct hit!!!” each time he squeezes one out, but no, I can’t go and relax because he wants to Talk to me. With the door open, and me sitting on the floor in front of him, with my eyes just at the critical height to see everything he’s doing, whether I particular want to or not.
And then we have The Conversation, which is to say, he asks me impossible questions and complains loudly that I don’t answer them properly, all the while pooing away. I also get informed that Miss O, his wonderful, fantastic, smart, young, good looking, slim, bubbly, sweet, patient, kind and loving kindy teacher knows the answer and then I’m asked why I can’t be more like her.
There’s really only one reason why I can’t be like Miss O.
Miss O, godblessheranyway, hasn’t had kids!
And thus, as a bad mother with more pressing things to do than to patiently await his majesty to get off the throne and clean himself up, I still I voluntarily offer to wipe my 6 year old’s poopy arse, because I really don’t want to spend another 10 minutes watching him work his way through a whole roll of dunny paper to spreading it across his butt cheeks and up his back, possibly through his hair, only to praise his efforts, unblock the blocked-with-a-whole-roll-of-paper toilet and clean him up anyway.
Come to think of it, perhaps that wasn’t vegemite on his forehead when I dropped him off.
Oh well, nothing I can do about it, its Miss O’s problem now.
* sigh*
