When will I learn?
I think I have mentioned before how touchy our before school routine is. Getting through the necessary steps and out the door with a positive outlook for both mother and child is tricky at best. I should know better than to mess with the equilibrium.
Today right before we left for school I found the child shrugging into a cropped black “velvet” jacket with ruffles. This is one of her favorite new finds from the latest batch of hand-me-downs that are her size. She does have some interesting taste in clothes. The funny thing was it really did complete a look for her. It made her look just like a bull fighter. She was wearing bright pink knee socks. She had rolled her leggings up to the knee so they looked like capris. With her fancy little jacket she looked just like a bull fighter. [This is where I should have kept my mouth shut.] I said, “You look just like a bull fighter.” She said, “What?” [This is where I should have said, “Never mind, let’s go to school.”] I said, “Remember, just like in the Toot and Puddle Book.” Even as the words left my mouth I was thinking, why am I getting into this with her? Amazingly I quickly found the aforementioned book, and showed her the page where Toot dresses up like a bull fighter on his travels to Spain. “See, knee socks, short pants, fancy jacket…” [This is where I should have stopped…] “the only difference is they are wearing a hat.” “I can find a hat to wear, Mom.” [This is where I started to realize that I really should have kept my mouth shut.] She rummaged in the pretend box for a few seconds and came up with a baseball hat. Okay. Now we were ready to go.
We walked about a quarter of the way to school when I realized there was a problem. She was wearing a hat with a beer ad on it. We are not beer drinkers. It’s just a freebie hat from some event that we attended a long time ago – thus pretend box fodder. She didn’t know it was a beer hat, but my guess was the principal wouldn’t be too happy to see a student wearing a beer ad to the elementary school. Just a guess.
So now I had a dilemma. We’re too late to walk back home, but I don’t feel comfortable letting her go to school with this hat. [This is maybe where I should have just explained to the teacher and asked her to help handle it?] So I explained to the child that I just realized this wasn’t a good hat to wear to school. “Why?” [Yeah explain that one mom…this was all “your idea” to begin with.] First she wanted to go home and get a different hat [see no time above] then she wanted me to bring a different hat to school for her. [Should I have done that? Remember this was all kind of my bad anyway.]
Well, we made it to school, barely on time, but man was she ticked at me. She had transformed from the bull fighter into the bull. I gave the high sign to the teacher’s aide and warned her that the child was a bit mad at me, then took a deep breath and made my way back home. I’m becoming convinced that there is something magic about the threshold of school. I sent the teacher a note a little later in the day to find out if everything was okay and she said she didn’t even know there was a problem. Huh.
Who needs a trip to Spain anyway.