The Day After Labor Day

It's back to school for the kiddies, and facebook is full of everyone posting pics of their kids in their new school duds, getting on the school bus, standing in front of the school, blah blah blah, and all of these teary eyed statuses. Oh my god, kill me now. I'm so over the back to school thing I've started calling it The Day After Labor Day. This would also be The Day That I Finally Got A Huge Reduction In My Childcare Bill Because They're Both In A Real School. And that is what this day was really about to me.

But because it's all about The Day After Labor Day, I feel almost obligated to write some complete tripe about how the children did, how I did, how the day felt, how I was worried, so on and so forth. What I was really doing was going through my day at work, trying to catch up, since I went in late so I could stay at daycare and take pictures of the girls getting on the school bus. This is the first year I've actually done this, having sent The Ex to take pictures for the last two years. But since we're separated now, I can't be one-upped. This is due to two reasons: my competitive nature, which means this divorced family thing might just be turning into a one-sided competition to see who is the more doting parent (I am), and my fear of the shit that he might talk to the children about me if I don't show up to these events now.

My younger daughter was super excited, because she thinks she's super cool and ready to head straight to college. I actually think she's a little above her grade level, but we'll see. She's caused me so many problems with her fucking logical thinking throughout most of her five years of life that I actually had her IQ tested when she was three because I felt like I was dealing with a child who had the reasoning abilities and motor coordination of a nine or ten year old. However, just to see if the school people are worth their salt, I'm keeping that to myself. We'll see what they come up with. I know if she ends up skipping a grade here or there, her older sister is going to be devastated and that's what I really don't want to deal with.

My older daughter was too cool for Mommy to take any pictures of. Just to be a mean Mommy, I did it any damn way. I was so annoyed with her acting like that I almost followed the bus to school to take more pictures of her, just to really ruin her first day at school. But I didn't, because I realize that I need to space out my embarrassing her. I want my embarrassing her to really have it's full effect, and thus, I can't just be doing embarrassing shit all the time. She'll work up a tolerance to it, and that in turn will cause me to have to go to a higher level of embarrassment, which will ultimately end up just embarrassing me. She's lucky I know this, because otherwise I'd just be acting like all of the other helicopter moms running around the school. I get to be the cool mom because I don't do that, at least not all the time. I've also discovered that just a simple threat of embarrassing her is starting to work. She'll pull herself together in short order to avoid that. The younger daughter, this totally doesn't work for, because she thinks it's hilarious and she just laughs that screaming belly laugh when I try to do something that might embarrass her. And we've come full circle back to her logical skills. She knows, even if it's subconsciously, that if she resists being embarrassed and just acts delighted instead, that I'm the one who will walk away from the whole interaction feeling like a damn fool, and she and I will both know that she won. The younger daughter, she is me, and that is what really scares me.

The Day After Labor Day. It was a good day.