Sometimes I wonder what weekday mornings would be like without kids.
Good example: My Halloween day this year began at 4:30 a.m. I was awakened by the sound of my cellphone ringing. It was my sister calling an hour before my usual wakeup time.
Mark Kennedy“What’s wrong, Sis?” I said.
“I’m so sorry to call this early,” she said. “But I went out to start my car just now and it’s completely dead. Is there any way you could drive me to the airport?”
“Sure,” I said. “Let me put on some clothes, and I’ll be right over.”
I pulled on a pair of camouflage shorts, stepped into my Crocs, and headed for the car.
“OK, it’s 4:30,” I thought. “Maybe I can get her to the airport and be home in time to go back to sleep for an hour.”
Wishful thinking.
It is a 60-minute trip from Signal Mountain to the airport and back. My usual wake-up time on school days is 5:45 a.m. plus one glorious 9-minute snooze cycle. My morning routine is so scripted that five minutes either way can throw off my family’s school-morning launch sequence. Still, I was glad to help my sister, who has come to my rescue plenty of times.
Traffic was light and we had an easy trip across town. I took some comfort in the fact that, while my morning would be busy, it wouldn’t, like hers, involve being in Phoenix, Ariz., by 9.30 a.m. local time for a business meeting.
As I pulled up to the Chattanooga airport, my sister grabbed her bags and headed for her gate. Meanwhile, I took her car keys and promised to check out her car battery while she was away.
I got home at 5:40 a.m. and took a five-minute nap that felt like a single deep breath. Then it was back to the kitchen to make our two boys’ lunches.
The boys eat the same lunches 180 school days a year. Our older son requires a small Lunchable, Doritos chips, mini-muffins, a short stack of Ritz crackers and a red Powerade. Our younger son gets a big Lunchable, Cheetos, mini-muffins and a purple G2 sports drink.
Sometimes in my sleepy stupor I get their drinks mixed up and I hear about it later when they get home. On his birthday last month, my younger son grabbed an empty lunch box.
Oops.
I finished the lunches by 6:10 a.m. and ran upstairs to wake the boys. Our older son gets dressed immediately, while our younger son comes downstairs for a 30-minute nap in Mom and Dad’s bed in the master bedroom.
For the next 20 minutes, I drank my first cup of black coffee, wrestled with the family dog and scanned the headlines on four online news sites. I shaved, showered and dressed in 15 minutes.
At 7 a.m., five minutes after my wife left for work, she texted me to ask me to send her some photographs of our older son, who was turning 15 that day. She wanted to make a Facebook collage. I immediately started darting around the house with my iPhone, snapping images of photos in scrapbooks, wall-mounted pictures and mantel portraits. I sent six images in all, representing several phases of his life.
By now, the dog was barking at me, wanting his morning walk. Thankfully, he is on a regular schedule and can usually do his business in five minutes.
Back inside, son No. 2 remembered he needed some permission papers signed for school. And he also needed somebody to compute his reading log for the entire month of October. I sat on the couch punching numbers into a calculator while he called out the entries on his daily reading log… 20 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes… Halfway through I messed up and we had to start again… 20 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes…
Then we quickly worked our after-school transportation plan and ran out the back door together at 7:45.
Ah, the leisurely life of a parent.
I started the car. Time to get to work.
Mark Kennedy is a resident of Signal Mountain. His columns appear in the Times Free Press on Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays. Contact him at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at facebook.com/mkennedycolumnist.