As I Was –

As I was enjoying my very well organized morning, I realized that something was terribly wrong. It only took me a fraction of a second to figure out what it was, but in that moment my feelings of accomplishment and pride were shattered and I was suddenly racing around my house with feelings of guilt and mortified embarrassment.

I have decided to homeschool my oldest, who has ADHD. We started a few weeks ago and have had some good days and some bad days…and some agonizing days where I feel like pulling my teeth out with my bare hands would be easier and less painful than the last 4 hours I just spent on one. short. lesson. Today was not one of those days. In fact, we were having a great time and catching up on some lessons that got behind.

The babies were sleeping, I mean fast asleep. I could have danced around the house like one of the Peanuts characters from Charlie Brown Christmas dance and they would have slept right through it. Little Nut Nut was at preschool, so there were no interruptions and the house was quiet and my ADHD child was focused, bright and well on his way to breaking a record for getting all of his lessons done well before lunch.

It was 11:50 and all was well.

Except that Little Nut Nut gets out of preschool at 11:30.

Sigh.

In that fraction of a second that I realized that I forgot to pick up my son from preschool, I was throwing my lesson plan to the floor, pushing my son ahead of me, pulling his lesson out of his hand and throwing that to the floor as well. At this point I am thinking, “Well, maybe I am not that late and no one will really notice” Knowing full well that I was lieing to myself as the guilt of my poor little boy waiting all alone while all the other kids were gone was settling in.

I snatched up She Nut and got her into the car seat and ran to pick up Owee. That 16 month old boy is huge and he was a 22 pound sleepy, floppy, rag doll that I was trying to hold on to as I fumbled with my cell phone to try to find the number to the school to tell them I was on my way. And then I heard the home phone ringing…knowing that it was poor forgotten Little Nut Nut’s teacher reminding me that I forgot to pick him up. My home phone doesn’t work…people can call into it, and sometimes it will ring through so that they can leave a message, sometimes it rings and then stops, and I am assuming that they have to call back to try to get a hold of me. I am not sure exactly what is going on with it, but I do know that it doesn’t work correctly. My answering machine can pick up, but I can not answer it myself about 95% of the time. So of course I am not answering the phone that almost never works, knowing that she will leave a message and hopefully a phone number because I can’t seem to get my fingers working well enough to find the phone number on my cell.

She leaves a number. Mortified, I call her back as I run down to my van telling her I am on my way.

When I get there, my son and his teacher are out front playing and he doesn’t even seem to notice that he has been forgotten. As I grovel and beg for forgiveness, his teacher politely says its OK and she understands, but I can read her expression and I can tell that I after only 1 week of school, I have already been branded as “That Mom”.

Sigh.