Dividing Into Thirds

My blog-friend Elizabeth posted something the other day that made me laugh the kind of empathetic laugh that comes from suffering through a shared experience!  Her post is called Air Traffic Control and relates to the sometimes-insane logistics of getting multiple kids where they need to be when they need to be there.

Thinking about that today in connection with the logistics of my own family for this evening--it's Back To School Night at my kids' elementary school.  There are two parent information sessions, but I have three kids in this school.  Himself and I could easily cover it between us, but he's leaving town this afternoon to run a 200-mile relay race with my brother and some of my brother's friends.  The first member of their team will start running at 2PM tomorrow afternoon and they'll keep trading off until they finish the 200 miles, probably sometime late Saturday.  I think they are all cuckoo for cocoa puffs, but then, I spent half an hour yesterday morning tromping through what was probably poison ivy in the mud (grateful for my bottle of tecnu right now) unsuccessfully trying to find a geocache under a low bridge in a state park, so I'm not sure I have standing to call anyone else nuts.  To each his own.  Anyway, the upshot of this is that I have to find a way of hitting all three class presentations by myself tonight, since parents are supposed to write notes to their kids during these visits and they'll know tomorrow if I didn't get to their classes.

And it's actually even a bit more complicated than that, sadly.  Left to my own devices, I'd swing quickly by Petunia's classroom before it starts, write in her notebook and then attend the other two presentations, since (for two different sets of reasons) I'm a lot more worried about my sons.  But of course, courtesy of Murphy's Law, I am Petunia's homeroom mom for the year (I told the woman coordinating the program that she could put me in any of the three classes if she needed me and this is where I ended up) so I have to be in that classroom for at least part of the time while other parents are there.  New plan: attend the boys' class presentations, ducking out of each with five minutes to go to run to Petunia's classroom and get parents to sign up for things, while also hitting the G&T presentation for Thing One during the half hour between parent session 1 and parent session 2.

Hopefully Himself will have the sense not to call this evening: I will probably bite his head off!!