Today was Joe’s first day of school. He’s already beginning second grade. With a heavy heart, I rushed to get our little guy out of bed and all spiffed up in his special first day of school ensemble..shorts and button down shirt. We fed him a nourishing breakfast and attempted to ease his anxiety about a new classroom and his new teacher. We walked down to the driveway to the bus stop as a family and waited for that big yellow bus together.

It never showed up.

Last week, four days before school started, the bus driver called Dave to say that from now on she would be picking all the elementary kids up at one stop that is up the road from our houses. She said that it is acceptable for elementary school children to walk 1/3 of a mile to the school bus. She says it’s perfectly safe for our seven year old with ADHD to walk 1/3 of a mile on our long, wooded and hilly non-residential road.

David called the head of the transportation department and had a lovely conversation. He was told the bus would continue turning around in the same spot it always has. Problem solved, right?

Wrong.

The bus drivers decided to skip our stops this morning, leaving my little guy (and his entire family) standing at the end of our driveway for 30  minutes. The bus garage wasn’t picking up the phone.

My neighbor drove Joe to school with her son.

When I finally got through to the bus garage, the person on the other end took great pleasure in informing me that the head of transportation never told the drivers or dispatch about the conversation with Dave. His voiced nearly dripped with condescension and pleasure when informed me that the bus will only be driving down the road as far as the “new pick up”.

So as of now, the bus drivers deem our desolate country road safe for a little children to walk on. Our little boy with ADHD, the one who can’t walk up the driveway without taking a distracted right-hand turn into the woods, is mature and responsible enough to navigate 1/3 of a mile walk to and from the bus stop.

I’m wondering which representative from the school drove down our road and determined that the road is safe for children to walk on. Who looked at the woods, lack of homes, hills and lack of sidewalks and said, “Yup, elementary school children are entirely safe on this road.” Clearly it wasn’t the person who wrote ”Safety and not sidewalks will be the determining factor for a student to walk to school or to a central bus stop” in the Student Transportation Policy. 

Who loves back to school shopping with preschoolers and elementary school children? Shoe shopping is especially fun, no? We’ve visited a shoe store here in Southern Maine that inspired me to write Yelp review. Here it is.

What’s the fastest way for a business to inspire me to write a Yelp review? Mostly, by being amazing. By offering tremendous, friendly and helpful assistance because that’s what sales associates should do. Right?

Alternatively, Lamey-Wellehan Shoes in South Portland Maine inspired me to write a Yelp review for an entirely different reason. Because they suck. That’s right, I said that they suck.

In the year and a half that we have lived in Portland, Maine, we have visited this store at least 4 times. I wanted to like them but I can honestly say that on each and every occasion, they have sucked. Let me list some of the reasons why they suck.

1. There is never enough staff.
2. If there is enough staff, they are too busy chatting with each other or hiding in some location other than the area where I am standing and waiting for someone to bring me a shoe…or notice that I’m breathing.
3. They don’t know how to measure children’s feet.
4. They clearly don’t really want to measure children’s feet.
5. They only offer to help you if you venture into the women’s shoes and feign interest in nurse clogs.

Okay, I could go on and on here but mostly, I’d like to point out to the sales staff at Lamey-Wellehan Shoes in South Portland that they are selling COMFORT CLOGS. You are not the shoe salon in Saks Fifth Avenue. Get over yourselves.

Also, I wholly apologize that my two year old daughter had the audacity to pick up a handful of your artfully arranged silk flowers. You clearly spent a huge amount of time placing them amongst your comfort clogs and orthopedic sandals. Nothing says, YAY, buy some Jesus sandals! more than tacky dollar store flowers.

Seriously, how dare she! I especially enjoyed the loud and annoyed observation made by one of your 20-something associates, “Ugh, she’s stealing the flowers!” Paired with her sneer of disgust, the whole statement smacked of professionalism.

Don’t worry,  I beat my daughter as soon as we left and called her an asshole for ruining your display. (Do I have to point out that I’m kidding about that last part?)

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that perhaps when a mother with three children is standing in the children’s area for 10 minutes waiting for some help, you might venture over and, I don’t know…HELP? We didn’t come in to hang out and play at Lamey-Wellehan. We came in to buy new shoes. Do you have idea how difficult it is to get three children fed, bathed, clothed and buckled into their carseats? That’s a four hour process! So at some point, your lack of attention is going to annoy me so much that I will let my kids pick up that giant Croc and throw it at each other. I will allow them to make a mess and I will not make them pick it up. Because I’m spiteful and you’re jerks.

Also, professional shoe sales people of Lamey-Wellehan…I would suggest that perhaps you actually make a practice of checking out the shoes a potential customer is wearing. High quality means she’s ready to spend, right? If you see a woman in a pair of Gucci loafers you might want try selling some shoes to her.

I did spend. I spent big bucks on my children’s shoes at another shoe store. 4 strikes and you’re out. Considering that my children are 2, 5 and 7 years old, we have a whole lot of shoe purchases ahead of us…

Well, have to go now. Shoes.com is running a special on comfort clogs.

*no offense to comfort clog fans, nurses or Jesus sandals. All insults were solely intended for the sales associates who we have encountered at this particular shoe store. Also, I’m sure that many of you have had perfectly lovely experiences there. Congratulations.

For this week’s prompt, I’d like you to be inspired by the poem below by William Carlos Williams. “The Red Wheelbarrow” has long been a poem that holds an air of mystery and intrigue for me. For it to be so few words, I feel it tells a complex tale with a lot hidden just below the surface. Take any word, image, or feeling evoked from “The Red Wheelbarrow” and turn it into your masterpiece. Oh, and like Williams, let’s do things short and sweet. Write your piece in 300 or fewer words. 
 

So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens but I don’t care about that. I’m more interested in finding my rabbit. We just came home from the Washington County Fair, blue ribbon in hand. He hit the big time in the 4H barn. My bunny named Melvin made me proud.

When I opened his cage and reached in, attempting to quickly transfer him to his hutch, Melvin made a break for it. He hopped like the wind. Melvin hopped so quickly that his little white and black body made a crazed zigzag pattern across the lawn, over the driveway, past the garden and into a hole near the compost pile.

Melvin, my blue ribbon winning bunny rabbit scored high in the looks department, but lacked the acumen to identify a weasel hole.

I knelt at the edge of the hole and attempted to peer down the narrow passage into the earth. I plaintively called to Melvin, all the while knowing that he was a lost cause.

Poor Melvin.

I sat back in the grass, smelling coffee grounds mixed with hot, rotting vegetables and loam in the compost pile. Helplessly, I looked up at the sky and watched large puffs of clouds float past. Behind me, I could hear the chickens protesting as the old and infirm – the ones who no longer laid eggs – were gathered for execution.

Should I sit here and pointlessly wait for Melvin’s unlikely emergence from the depths of the earth or should I run and hide before they put me to work on chicken slaughter day?

These are the quandaries of living on a farm when you are ten years old.

I wished Melvin the best then stepped into the meadow, allowing the tall grass to conceal me.

You want to know what I think about a lot? I think about my wedding dress…or lack thereof. David and I were married on August 5, 2001 in Newport, Rhode Island. We planned our wedding around the Newport Folk Festival. We weren’t expecting that anyone would come to our simple little ceremony in the King Park Gazebo with a Justice of the Peace. But they did.

When his family began talking about coming to our wedding, we quickly pulled together a location, a caterer and a photographer.  We’re pretty sure that everyone was confused by the whole thing…the camping in a state park the night before we were married…the lack of invitations,ceremony, flowers, music…But it wasn’t about anyone else.

It was simply about the two of us.

I didn’t wear a traditional wedding dress. That’s the only part I regret. I wish that David saw me walking toward him in a long, delicate gown. I wish that I had my hair and makeup done that morning. I wish that he was the one who saw me that way.

I was too concerned with the fact that I had already been married once before. I was too concerned with what the people in my family would think. We never registered for wedding gifts and I was far too worried about how it would look if I wore a real wedding dress to our wedding.

Today is our 10th Anniversary.

I’ve never loved a person as deeply as I love him. I think that I can confidently say that no one has ever loved me as deeply and as unconditionally as he does.

I’ve never stopped feeling blessed that we finally found each other.

We never had a honeymoon but I don’t think we’ve really needed one.

We survived the loss of his new job one day after we were married. The job that we had just moved to Boston for two days before our wedding. For five years, we lived like paupers while David went to law school. We had three beautiful healthy babies and each other.

In our ten years together we’ve experienced blissful happiness, intense worry, fear, disappointment and a whole lot of laughter. I wouldn’t change a single moment.

Happy Anniversary, my love.

I have some issues with the need to keep my space clean. As in squeaky.

I will, however, admit that in the past year I’ve lightened up a little bit. The kids are small, the house is big and I’m too damn busy to do things like wipe the windowsills once a week! I’ve gotten a tiny bit better. I don’t always dust twice a week. I no longer mop the floors once a week and sometimes I let a mountain of laundry sit on the folding table for so long that it gets all wrinkly. While I’m at it, I’ll also fess up to throwing said wrinkled laundry right back into the washing machine to avoid ironing it. Whatever, don’t pretend you’ve never done that. If you haven’t, then give yourself a big old kick in the ass pat on the back.

So, even though I’ve relaxed my cleaning regime slightly, I think I might just be operating like any normal mother with three children and a spastic dog, who is attending graduate school and attempting to keep up with her husband/friends/blog/house/life.

Yesterday I decided to wipe down all of the baseboards in the kitchen. But that project quickly turned into me washing every baseboard on the first floor. While I was down there on the floor scrubbing away at what looked like a rather nasty chocolate milk splatter, I observed that when I inspect the house from the height of a tiny human, it’s disgusting. There were greasy fingerprints, smears and smudges on the beadboard walls, the french doors, the kitchen chairs and pretty much anything below 3 feet. So much for relaxing my standards.

I found myself crawling through the entire first level of our house, peering under radiators, behind drapes and even beneath the clawfoot tub.

About a month ago I noticed a mysterious brown and chunky substance smeared on the closet door in the foyer. Someone had also taken a considerable amount of time smearing whatever it was on the glass to the side of the front door as well. At the time, I noted the existence of that brown stuff and then I turned and walked away. I walked away hoping that it was something other than what it looked like and, since it didn’t smell like what it looked like, I left it there. Yes, that’s right. I left it there. And I also left the house for 10 days knowing that the brown mystery substance was there.

I’m not sure what possessed me to go away for ten days and leave it festering on the door, but it felt damn good! Maybe on some level I was hoping that someone else would take care of it. Someone like the maid or a herd of cleaning fairies or my husband.

In the end, even though I left for ten days, the brown goop stayed. It waited for me to return and then it patiently waited another two weeks for me to cave in and attack it.

While I was crawling around the first floor wiping down baseboard and woodwork, the brown goopy chunks of smeared stuff caught my eye yet again. So with a defeated sigh I stood up and stalked into the kitchen to retrieve a butter knife with which to scrape the dried goo off the door.

Turns out it was banana.

Click here to summon those elusive cleaning fairies.