Thursday, January 22, 2004

New on Mothers with Attitude

Ken Swarner's latest Family Man column deals with the impossibility of getting kids out the door in any sort of timely fashion, and boy, do I hear that. Mornings here have just gotten more hectic since my daughter moved up to middle school while my son stayed in elementary. The girl's not the problem. She's a morning person. She's early to rise. She showers, dresses, makes her own breakfast, puts her things in the car, then wakes me up. She's a gem. Her brother, though ... well, her brother is a slugabed like his mom. We're a bad combination. He doesn't want to get moving in the morning, and I'm moving too slowly to make him.

When both kids went to the same school, my daughter's nagging usually got all of us into the car and to the schoolhouse on time. But now, her nagging only extends to the point at which we drop her off at the middle school. My son's dressed at that point -- his sister sees to it -- but unbreakfasted, and it's still too early to drop him at his school. So we go home ... where there's a TV. And a comfy couch. And a computer. And beds to make. And food to eat. And juice to drink. And shirts to change after the food and the drink get spilled. And toys to play with for just one more minute, Mom. And we just get tardier and tardier and tardier.

So this morning, as I told my guy again and again that we really need to move now, please, no, not one more minute, right now, NOW, really, I dozed off and now it's really really time to GO, I thought: "Yep, the Family Man's got it right, kids have no motivation to move it." But I know that if my daughter read that column, she'd say: "Kids? What about MOMS?"

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