on the fast track to a life of crime

*Bad boys, Bad boys, Whatcha gunna do? whatcha gunna do when they come for you...*

This is one of those parenting things that secretly make you say, "YES!! Good job, baby girl!!" but at the same time, you feel massive parental guilt for feeling this way.

I think that the end of the school year blahs has hit my house. It is just too hard to keep up with all the paperwork and reading and crap that the schools send home. (I have actually been making Elizabeth read her Reading Counts! books in the car on the way home from school... its not like we are doing anything else anyway.) We also can't seem to drag our respective asses out of the bed in the morning. It has actually gotten really out of hand.

For Elizabeth to be at school on time, we MUST be in the car, buckled and ready, at 7:30. Without fail, even if we nearly accomplish this, Colby takes a dump in his diaper every morning at 7:29. I cannot begin to tell you how many times I have picked him up to buckle him in and then start cussing and run back to the house with him in tow.

In case you don't know this, you cannot take your kid to daycare with a load. You might as well send him in with a happy meal and a pack of cigarettes, because all the daycare people will talk about how you are so wrapped up in your own life that you let your kid walk around in turdpants.

So anyway, this is my life. Last week, Elizabeth was late THREE days running and got THREE pink slips for tardiness. Great. I understand doing this when your kid is 17, but 6? It's not like it is her fault that I am a lazy ass that spends too much time drinking coffee and checking my email before I wake her up in the morning.

So Wednesday, we are late... again. I tried to hurry them along at home with threats of how Elizabeth was not going to be an Artist/Doctor/Princess, because she will never get into college with all those pink slips on her record. It didn't work. I dropped her off at the doors 7 minutes after school started. I felt like crap.

Until I went to pick her up on Wednesday afternoon.

I asked her how her day was, and she replied, "It was GREAT!! And I didn't get a pink slip!!" and she was grinning from ear to ear.

"Didn't get a pink slip?? How did you NOT get a pink slip??"

"Well, see, I peeked around the corner and waited until all the office ladies weren't looking and then I RAN as fast as I could on my tippytoes past their door. And then I went to my class and everyone was playing and no one even knew I was late!!" She was SO proud of herself.

And I was pretty proud too... I mean, disappointed at her lack of... nah, I was proud.