The bus the bus the bus the bus the bus

Let it herewith be known that the Special Needs Preschool has A BUS.

The kids? They can take the bus. The bus? It is free. The bus! Bus! The Bus! Have I heard, have you heard, has EVERYBODY HEARD…about The Bus?

Of the roughly thirty kids in the program at this school (no, not all in one classroom – there are six classrooms), about 27 of them take The Bus. The Bus picks them up outside their homes, transports them to preschool whilst parents (presumably) loll about in the pajamas eating bon-bons and watching Oprah, and then transports them home again.

The other three preschoolers, denied the splendor that is The Bus, have to be taxied to school by their crummy, boring and properly-clothed parents in their Not The Bus vehicles.

I have been told about The Bus, in exhaustive detail, at least five times now, by four different people.

They are wonderful, caring people who wish to ensure that I have heard about, you know, The Bus. Because the bus is a marvelous time-saving device, and also it can be very good for the children because it provides yet one more layer of school-related ‘predictable transition’, which is code for “helps settle their little butts down, because the bus means that they are about to be in school where there are rules and so they must begin to think about acting like civilized human beings rather than little animals who defecate on the kitchen floor and then run laughing like maniacs throughout the house while their mothers chase them with hastily snatched wipes yelping, ‘Wait, there’s still poop on your butt!!!’”.

Not, uh, that this has ever happened to me, you understand. I’m just saying, is all.

Ahem. ANYWAY.

Yes, The Bus is, indeed, a mighty thing.

We can’t use The Bus, however.

It is, you see, an issue of timing.

With the Kindertime program, my day is considerably simplified – but it is still lacking in the part where I sit around eating bon-bons and watching Oprah Money Hour.

While Captain Adventure could take the bus TO school, the part where he is taken BACK HOME is problematic. You see, he gets out of preschool at 3:00; at 3:00, I am already sitting in Homer the Odyssey in the parking lot at school, where I have been since shortly after 2:00. BECAUSE, Danger Mouse gets out at 2:20 and I am to pick up Boo Bug “before the school-age children arrive” because this is when Kindertime ends and Daycare begins and she is not in Daycare, she is in Kindertime.

By the time I’ve gotten those two, it’s at least 2:30, and often 2:40. Now I’ve got anywhere from twenty to thirty minutes before Eldest gets out at 2:55. Not really enough time to go home…so, we just stay there and wait…and wait…and wait…because Eldest takes about fifteen hours minutes to get from her classroom
allllll
the
long
weary
and
with
oh
so
many
distractions
waaaaaayyyyyyyyy
to the parking lot.

The earliest I could reliably be home to greet Captain Adventure as he descends from {angels singing} The Bus {/angels singing} is 3:30.

SOMETIMES, I’m home by 3:15. SOMETIMES, it’s almost 4:00. IT JUST DEPENDS, on everything from how long it takes Eldest to walk out from her classroom to which teacher caught me to talk about what horrible/splendid thing one of my kids did to getting stuck in traffic because some idiot must turn left out of the parking lot (though warned with stern ‘RIGHT TURN ONLY: CVC # 28672867286728671!!!!!!’ signs in not one, not two, but THREE places around the driveway) and cannot understand that until THEY move, the INTERSECTION IS BLOCKED.

See, it’s like that whole ‘circle of life’ kind of thing. Cars go into the driveway, around the pickup lane, and then out. Ergo, if the cars going into the driveway are blocking the intersection because the lane isn’t moving, and you’re sitting at the FRONT of the lane waiting for them to move…we can see the problem? Oh, we can’t? OK. We’ll all wait for it to dawn on you…because we have no choice…

Now, while it is entirely probable that at worst I would be skidding into the court just as the bus driver was coming back from having beaten on my door in a state of perplexity (“What kind of mother isn’t home to meet The Bus?!”)…it is also possible that fairly regularly we would miss The Bus entirely and I would have to drive back to the school for a sound scolding about the importance of The Bus and its time and that I should never, ever stand The Bus up like that again.

See, I just don’t want that kind of stress in my life.

It’s easier to park in the parking lot, pick up the first two, let them watch cartoons in the van for half an hour (forty minutes) while I knit and wait and wait and knit, and then we all walk over en masse to pick up Captain Adventure and yell across the quad at Eldest to hurry up, we’re not getting any younger over here!

Well, what would be easier would be if all four of them could take a bus. You know, I walk them out to the corner and the bus comes along and I hug them and they get on the bus and some hours later, I walk back out to the corner and here comes the bus and there is more hugging and perhaps we all sing a chorus of Kum Ba Yah and then we have snack.

Glory, hallelujah.

But, no. First of all, it would set me back $405 a school year for the older three Denizens – IF a bus were available to them. But it isn’t. Because you have to live 1.2 miles from the school to be on the route, and guess what?

We live 1.1 miles from the school.

Fie.

I surely do hope they’re done telling me about The Bus now. Because it is starting to depress me. Especially when you can’t do it just one way. If he can’t take it both ways, well, forget it. But! He should take it both ways! Because The Bus?

Nirvana.

**sigh**

In other news, the Yarn Monster is alive and well. While trying to pen this, he has given me three skeins of acrylic, one of Brown Sheep worsted, one of Cheryl Oberle’s Dancing and kept for himself a Lorna’s Laces and a ball of raw silk.

Little monster.

Oh crap. Now he’s after the sock yarns.

OK, so, uh, later!!

Get outta that Schaefer Anne, you little twerp…!