Never underestimate Thursday

One of the benefits of being awake at 4:30 AM is that you are exposed to such wonderful discoveries…like the fact that being awake at 4:30 AM pretty much blows! My mother in law needed a ride to the airport for a ridiculously early flight and I volunteered to do it….because I am not right in the head. Poor lady, I was so out of it I tried my hardest to drive her to Clearwater, but she kept me going in the right direction.

Because I’m one of those people who worries that they won’t wake up if they HAVE to be somewhere at some obscene time, I couldn’t fall asleep. So I rocked today on 2 hours of sleep.

Nathaniel’s legs seem to be outgrowing the rest of him, I know they’re outgrowing his school uniform pants. My plan this morning was to drop the kids off to head to class together and then for Peyton and I to boogie on over to where they keep the MASS amount of used uniform stuff. On our way there Nathaniel ran over to remind me that it was Thursday, chapel day, he was supposed to be wearing pants and in my ultimate mom slacker mode I had dared to let him leave the house in shorts!! So my quick decision was for him to run with me to the used clothing selection, we’d snatch him up a pair of pants, do a quick switch-a-roo (pray that whoever dropped off the clothing was kind enough to wash them first) and then he was good to go for the day. Plan executed….life good.

Then I start running into people. “What happened to Rachael?” “Did you know Rachael had a meltdown?” “Rachael was crying hysterically!” “Rachael was crying in class.”

Great. What was this new mess?

I finally got the story from my friends Meg and Jennifer who both have girls in the first grade. Apparently when Nathaniel ditched her to panic about the pants situation, she had a meltdown when the gate opened and it was time to go to her classroom. Now, every day since school started I’ve walked them to class…and most days that I COULD do it for the past two years…so it’s not like the routine is something new and foreign to her. The gate opens, the kids take off like the running of the bulls and she should go to her class. Instead, apparently she stood there and just started crying. Poor baby. She was so distraught because Nathaniel abandoned her there, she just melted down. Jennifer walked her to the class and handed her off to the teacher and she did fine for the rest of the day because no one called me to tell me she’d gone into a catatonic state from shock, but I did feel really bad that she’d gotten so upset at being left alone.

Did I tell you about my nomination for Mother of the Year? No? There’s a reason for that.

Peyton and I had a splendid time with some friends from Cracker Barrel. You know you spend way too much time at a restaurant when you start hanging out with the staff and their families socially. But Jeff and his wife Lorrin also attend out church with their two sweet boys Alex and Nick. So we finally made a playdate at Chick Fil A, where Peyton refused to actually play with the boys, but I had a good time talking to Lorrin and Jeff. They got a funny glimpse into our lives with a woman who was sitting beside us would NOT leave us alone. She just could not stop interrupting the conversation to ask questions about Peyton, to tell us about every person in her family who’s had cancer, to ask about All Children’s, to make sure I went to church, it went on and on and on.

Yes, it drives me crazy. Yes, it happens more than you’d think. People border on being rude, and sometimes they run swim right over that border as well….but I always try to remember that they do it out of the best of intensions and always trying to be their form of helpfulness It’s hard sometimes, when all you want to do is get through a complete sentence!

We got a late afternoon call from the Children’s Dream Fund, the group that sent us on our dream wish trip. Would we like to go to a Buc’s game? Are you kidding? Would we like to bathe in ice cream and be topped in whipped cream? Well, maybe not, but we were all about the game. It was a stretch because the game started at 8….that being the time we’re normally shuffling the kids off to bed. But we decided that since they only have a half day of school tomorrow, it doesn’t really matter if they’re freeze dried zombies.

Am I ever glad we went! Never would we be able to give them the opportunity of front row seats right under the Pirate Ship at Raymond James Stadium. Yeah, it was a pre-season game, but it completely rocked! We had so much fun and we had the Powells there for part of the game, the 6-pack reunited again. It was my first NFL game, so it was fun to see in person instead of on tv…I missed the instant replay, but it was so cool to be RIGHT freaking there! Because we were sitting in the front row the action was just too awesome. Two touchdown were right in our faces! The cheerleaders were really close which thrilled Peyton and Pete. The pirate ship being so close was hard because every time it went off Peyton jumped about 4 feet in the air, but she learned that whenever the crowd went wild to just cover her ears.

It was a ton of fun, we got to sit in the are reserved for “Amigos de Garcia” and also got t-shirts announcing our membership in this club. Much fun! We’re sitting just feet from the action, front row to all the fun and Rachael points to the nosebleed seat and says “I’d like to be sitting up high.” I told her that if we’d had to pay for own seats we would have been!

A HUGE thanks to the Children’s Dream Fund for providing us yet more Buc’s fun.

f.r.o.G….fully relying on God
–Anissa