::: made the bus in seconds flat :::

I was pretty much a dead woman until I realized that the annoying "blat, blat, blat" crashing through the wall of my dreams was the persistent nagging of the alarm clock. I forced my eyes open, tried in vain to see the blue numbers, then flopped back down.

"What time is it?" I asked my husband Bo, who sleeps closest to the clock and had just succeeded in shutting it up.
"Muttermuttermutter," he muttered.
"What?"
"Muttermuttermutter!" he remuttered.
"I'm sorry," I tried to say this very gently, "but I didn't understand you," though I kind of thought I did understand him, in some strange way, and I didn't like what I thought he said.
"mmmmmMMMMMGHrzZZ! I said, 'It's SiiiiiiX. Twentyyyyyyyy. TwooooooooooooOOOOOoooo!'"
"What?!?" Now, in case you think me an idiot, I heard him that time. The final "what" was a rhetorical question, because it wasn't what I was expecting to hear. It wasn't at all what I wanted to hear.

I jumped out of bed, ran down the stairs (which is pretty hard to do, considering that it's usually necessary to have access to one's ability to see in order to run down stairs with any measure of success), hollering (or at least muttering incoherently in a slightly loud voice), and shook Monet awake.

All of this because the alarm had been changed.

Because, see, Bo's morning hours change depending on what his job duties are that day. And even though we have two alarms on our clock, we seem to only use one. And while I had set the alarm to wake up at 5:45 to get Monet up, allow him time to get dressed, eat breakfast, gather his soccer things, and drive to the bus stop, Bo had re-set the alarm for 6:20 in order to give himself enough time to get clothes on and leave for work.

In other words, we were going to be late.

For Monet's second day of school. Second. Day. What kind of mother lets her son be late for the bus on his second day of school?

Who's late for their second day of anything?

Monet was a good sport. When I shook his sleeping body and screamed into his sleeping ears, he awoke, jumped into his clothes, and let me shove a bagel and some grapes into his mouth. His school and gym had been packed the night before. I threw him into the car--no dragging a comb across his head or a brush across his teeth--and sped like a demon to the bus stop, approaching the parking lot three minutes before the scheduled pick-up time.

Where the bus was waiting.

I pushed Monet out of the speeding car, propelling him toward the exiting bus where he grabbed the front crossing arm and held on for dear life.

Okay, he leaped out of the moving car directly onto the bus stairs.

Okay, I brought the car to a complete, albeit abrupt, stop, and he quickly opened the door and ran to the stationary bus, receiving a polite "hello" from the smiling bus driver.

Fortunately for us, the bus route was changed, and Monet's is now the first stop on the route. The driver was waiting for some other students, so someone else was making him wait. Not us.

Today, I bought the boy a travel toothbrush, hairbrush and some Clif Bars and shoved them in his backpack, just in case.

And I set the second alarm.