School Is Out!
After having a child in the Montrose School District for the past 21 years straight, I’ll tell you what I won’t miss now that my youngest just finished up her last day of school! I won’t miss getting that dreaded call from the nurse’s office. As soon as you see that number pop up on your caller id, fear and hopelessness sets in. Your child in any school system will pick up every single germ known to mankind. Every single one of them. They will bring home the violent stomach bugs that will hit every member of your household either simultaneously or one at a painful time, nasty colds that last for months, pneumonia, pink eye, lice, cooties, ticks, the bubonic plague, West Nile Virus, strep throat, mysterious rashes, bathroom issues, bronchitis, and basically every form of the horrible heeby jeebies you can conjure up. One day my son got off the bus with a super high fever, so I asked him why he didn’t go to the nurse so that I could come get him. He said, “I hate going to the nurse Mom, that’s where kids go to die.” He’s not wrong. I won’t miss when my kids were little and they’d walk through the front door crying because they had to “flip their card” for bad behavior. It might have happened once for each of them, because it was so humiliating that they never did that again! But boy there was complete devastation and inconsolable sobbing for a couple of days after those incidents. I won’t miss helping them pack a lunch when they didn’t want to buy, because I was always so worried it would turn into salmonella by the time their “late in the day” lunch rolled around. I won’t miss helping them empty their overstuffed, end of the year back pack load of papers and heaven knows what else lurking at the bottom of their mysteriously stained backpacks. I won’t miss the God forsaken school projects!! If I have to buy foam balls one more time for planets or cell illustrations, I might actually lose my mind. I’m not going to miss searching the planet for unique and different species of leaves for the leaf project, and then try to identify them when they all look alike to me. I’m not going to miss drawing a family tree with a hundred branches. Why couldn’t the first child hold onto that project for the younger siblings? Why wouldn’t they let us just cross Mike’s name off and put Thomas on there, and so on? It’s the same massive Irish tree! Nope, had to start at painful square one each time. I loved when the kids were in sports, but I’m not going to miss when all three of them had games in three completely different locations. The guilt from missing games still haunts me. I’m not going to miss sitting through subzero temperatures with blasting arctic air or the pouring cold rains during the spring and fall monsoon seasons for sports in cold Northeastern PA either; it’ll be so nice to sit inside at room temperature during sports seasons now! I have to cling to the things I won’t miss so that it distracts me from all the great stuff that I will miss. So for now we’ll all just embrace the fact that school’s out! My work here is done! Peace out!