Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Julep: shifting gears

Just read an article quoting Rand Paul in which I immediately thought, "What an idiotic thing to say." A little normalcy is a nice thing.

The kids start their new school on Monday - and will be classmates with the Twinkle sisters! I am excited about this in the big picture but getting anxiety about the transition. Under the new regime, Mr. J will be responsible for dropping the kids off every morning. He will have to be up and somewhat functional at 7:30 a.m. five days a week, and I am here to tell you that he is not good at getting out of bed in the mornings.Yes, he is an adult. Yes, this is the sort of thing that the rest of us had to learn to adapt to a solid twenty or thirty years back. I'm not trying to say it's reasonable, but it's a concern.

If it were me, I would be spending the start of August carefully trying to calibrate my bedtime and rising time to the new normal, so that next week would not be such a shock to the system. I don't have to tell you that I have (thus far) seen no signs that Mr. J is doing the same.

I thought I had a plan in place that was going to give me at least some way to force his hand -- I told him that I would get the kids up and dressed every morning, then leave for the office and let him handle breakfast and the drop-off. This plan masquerades as a division of labor, while allowing me to make sure the children are dressed decently and that they are up and roaming the house thus giving him an urgent sense of the need to get out of bed rather than simply sleeping though his alarm clock.

Then I realized this week that I will be out of town for work on Thursday and Friday mornings next week, and at least three mornings of the following week. Three mornings is simply not enough to get Mr. J into a new routine.

I'm starting to worry. My poor kids are going to spend their first two weeks at a new school being those kids who can't show up on time.

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