First Day of School - Part 2

     It has been A DAY! Got Kyle off to school without a hitch and things began to cascade downhill. First, I find that little man, precious little man who tries so hard to please (when he wants to) absolutely DEMOLISHED my flash drive. It was on clearance at Meijer and super cute with eyes that lit up whenever new data was entered or extracted, and now it's dead, ripped to pieces - and there isn't another one like it. Problem? My text book that I had to download 15 times before it stopped giving me error messages is on that drive. ALL of the assignments I have turned in for all of my classes so far are on that drive. And I have a sneaking suspicion last year's taxes are on that particular drive.

     *BIG sigh* and I'm over it. Upset, but what's done is done. I fixed up the remainder of the leftover steak and Jaden and I had it for lunch. How could that go wrong, right? Cold sore. I have had a cold sore since the 1st, and it feels like it's beginning to make its retreat. Or, it felt like it WAS anyway. Long story short, I made the mistake of using my teeth to retrieve a stray piece of meat from my lip. Teeth over cold sore = blood gushing from lip. I quickly cover it up and ask little man to get me a paper towel or toilet paper or a wipe.... Just something to catch the blood pooling in my palm. He couldn't move. He was completely transfixed on the idea that blood could escape in such quantities from a lip. I was too, honestly. A little numbing chapstick later, and I got over that too.

     A little later I looked outside and noticed the horse a little closer to the house than normal. Yeah, she got out. But she didn't break the fence or find some magic line that happened to be a little too low to help her escape. No, the gate was WIDE OPEN. The wind let her out. It was blowing hard enough that it broke the rope holding the gate shut and she took the opportunity. I had to get her back in, but there was a 3-foot-tall problem. Little man LOVES to be outside. It doesn't matter what he's doing. He just wants to be out. So trying to explain to him why he couldn't go outside and be under the hooves of a 1000+lb beast was practically impossible. My solution? Put all of his pants that are in his sight up too high for him to notice. He was in undies and a T-shirt, and he KNOWS outside is a no-no when he's dressed like that. I proceed outside with peppermints in hand, flip-flops on my feet. She followed me willingly. She'd do anything for a mint. But as we got closer to the open gate, I felt like maybe I was a little too far over to actually force her (or lead her) into the pasture... and my feet were getting scared. She was following me, but she was backing me into a corner at the same time. I pushed her back, got her in, tied the rope up and hurried inside. I need to get a new rope. Or a chain with a lock. Don't let me forget.

     Then the topper: the bus never came to drop Kyle off. Yes, I was freaked out, and I was planning out all of the possibilities of how I could retrieve him. And I was thinking of all the things that could've happened. It's windy, so the bus may have went off the road? Maybe they were waiting at the corner where they drop other kids off to the parents' waiting vehicles? I decided I would give them until 5 to get him home and I'd start making calls, but I did bundle little man up and begin a trek down the road to search for signs of a big yellow bus. At 4:58 I got a call from the guy in charge of buses. Kyle took the wrong bus and got a tour of the totally wrong neighborhood. The guy drove him home (as well as a slew of other kids that were directed to the wrong buses), and Kyle looked at me like a puppy that peed on the floor after it was left in the house just a little too long. I told him I wasn't going to yell at him. What's the point? He spent an hour freaking out about how he was going to get home, and I was just glad to have him home. Besides, I took the wrong bus home from the mall once when I was a teenager, and instead of going from Carlsbad to Oceanside, I ended up in Escondido. Not alone, but that bus driver made me feel completely stupid - and she refused to allow us back onto the bus to get back where we belonged. We had to call some pretty pissed off parents to come and get us a good 45 minutes out of their way. I remember that feeling, and it's scary enough to not know where the heck you are... but to have so many people belittle you because of it was SO uncool. I can poke fun at him because I know how he felt, and I know he wasn't in any danger. Thank GOD!!!

     That pretty much turned the day around. He was in an awesome mood, and all of the illness from this morning had dissipated. He ate like a teenager when he got home and told me about his teachers, his new classmates, the fact that he is the ONLY freshman in one of his classes that is otherwise full of seniors, and handed me all of his exciting paperwork to sign. So today did have some minor hangups, but we got through it. Kyle a little shaken over his mishap, me a little sore from a nice bloody lip but thankful for not getting a broken foot, and little man blissfully unaware of much of it.