Give Me A Break, Please!

Well today is already off to a rockin’ start. I woke up this morning having one of those waking nightmares where you get disoriented because you know you are not where you should be, but you do not know exactly where you are.

Turns out, instead of being in bed, with my laptop waking me up to the sound of Christmas bells (the kids like that one) I’m out in the living room in my recliner. Said laptop is right where I left it last night when I went to bed, next to my bed.

So I glance up at the clock in the living room, but my eyes are still all blurry and I can’t see just yet, but when I do see well enough to know what’s going on, I see Kristen on the floor in the living room on a new air mattress I bought yesterday, because she says the other mattresses we have are too hard for her. She’s on this air mattress reading a book. Incredulously I look at her and ask her what time it is, and she says, “About 8 o’clock.” Well it turns out it was only 7:25, so it wasn’t that bad, but it begs the question, if she thought it was 8 a.m., what the heck was she doing reading a book instead of getting ready for school?

So I asked her, “What the heck are you doing reading a book instead of getting ready for school?” To which she responds:

“Oh, I dunno.”

I pray for the country tomorrow.

So I jump up out of the recliner and navigate around the air mattress, which is taking up almost the entire middle of the living room (making it even more amazing I could do this in the night while sleep walking, going from my bed to the recliner), and I go into the bedroom to wake up Master Isaiah (I’ve been calling him that lately, and he says, “Master?” Maybe I need to stop that – it might go to his head.)

Isaiah is still sound asleep, and when I wake him up to get him dressed, and I tell him he needs to hurry because we will be late for school, he immediately starts crying. I’m talking bawling. What seems to be the problem? The new Army truck I bought him at Dollar General yesterday is somewhere outside Aaron’s and Tiffany’s house, and if it is so late he won’t have time to look for it. Even when I promise him I would go back to the Dollar General to get another, he keeps on bawling his eyes out, so I just told him if he was not going to stop crying, I would not go back to the Dollar General and buy another one. Well that just makes him bawl even louder.

Somehow I manage to get him dressed while bawling, and I try to comfort him to get him calm enough so he could go to school. Then I realize it’s like 7:40, and usually Mike or Lucy from up the street have already come down by now to pick up the kids, since my car is still not working while we look for a crankshaft pulley holder thingamabobber tool, but they have not shown up. It would take a half-hour to walk to school but we had half that time to get there on time. So I move Isaiah out the door while Kristen is frantically trying to find one of her sneakers, which she finds by the door, which is where I always tell them to take off their shoes, and we walked up to Mike and Lucy’s. Turns out their kids are late getting motivated too, so they are eating breakfast, and after I give Mike the Reader’s Digest condensed version of the story I am writing to you folks now, he asks me if they had eaten breakfast, and I say no. So he calls the kids in and gets them Fruit Loops, while I go next door and look around for Isaiah’s lost Army truck outside of Aaron’s and Tiffany’s house. It is hard to distinguish from Aaron’s many trucks on the front porch, but after a few minutes of skulking around, I find said Army truck sitting on the side of their grill.

By that time, Mike tells Lucy it is 7:55, the exact time the kids are supposed to be at their desks. I hate being late for anything, but after everything that happened today, I figure being a few minutes late is still a monumental accomplishment, because I did all this without even having one cup of coffee.

I aim to do something about that.