Win Some, Lose Some

Oh, Lord, y’all.  I’m about to tell you a really long, detailed story about how I messed up royally and it will make you feel better about your own life decisions.

So, last Thursday, I happened to look at my family Google calendar and realized that I had mistakenly put Bean’s school’s Mother/Son event on the wrong date.  I had it scheduled for the following Wednesday instead of the very next day.

This posed quite a few scheduling issues. First, I was supposed to be taking a planning day with three teachers in my school to work on something together.  That meant that we all had previously arranged substitutes that would now have to be moved to a different day (which doesn’t sound that complicated, but it’s a ginormous headache for a teacher).  So, I had to tell my peer teachers about my mistake and they all had to rearrange substitutes because of it.  I felt awful.

Friday comes, and I am walking myself up to the kids school for the event.

(Let me pause here to remind you that I am on the PTA.  And not just on the committee.  I’m on the BOARD of the PTA.  That’s important in this juncture of the story…)

So, I’m walking up to the school and I see a few of the other Board members all standing together.  Assuming they were getting ready for the event, I walked up and said, “Are you guys excited?”

“Excited about what?” they asked.

“The Mother/Son event!” I squealed.

And then they all looked at me like I had three heads and absolutely no sense.

“That’s next Wednesday, Katie,” one of them said.

Turns out, Friday stuck out in my head as important because it was the due date for the money and forms.  The actual event wasn’t until Wednesday.  Which means, my teacher group had all moved their plans and I took an entire day off school for no damn reason.

I hang my head in particular shame because I’m normally so organized!  This kind of stuff never happens to me!

(Except for that time I showed up for a birthday party two weeks early with a covered dish to share.)

(Come to think of it, that was for my friend, Jamie, who is also on the PTA Board.  Maybe this is Jamie’s fault!)

What can I say?  Some days you win, some days you lose.  And some days you lose twice.  In front of people.  And you are embarrassed.  And people are inconvenienced.  And then your kid is disappointed because he thought he was going to Fun Spot with you.

I explained to Bean when I picked him up from school that I had gotten the dates wrong, so we weren’t actually going to Fun Spot today.  And that since I had taken today off, I probably couldn’t take the Wednesday off, too.  So, really, we weren’t going to Fun Spot together at all.  And just when I felt like the worst mother/volunteer/co-worker in the world, Bean just smiles genuinely and says, “I don’t care if we go to Fun Spot.  Let’s just do something fun ourselves!”

Is he not the greatest kid in the world?

So, I let him pick whatever he wanted to do (within normal “mom” reason).  He wanted to go get ice cream and then shop around at Barnes and Noble for a while.  Proving that he is, indeed, my child.

We spent the next few hours hanging out, just the two of us.  And it was wonderful and made me feel slightly less loser-ish.  But that kind of made me feel even more loser-ish because isn’t that what mom’s are supposed to do for kids and not the other way around?

The only thing I know to do to make it up to Bean is buy him something he really, really wants.  Like the Death Star.  Or maybe just a Nerf gun.  I’m still deciding if the Death Star would fit in our garage.  Probably not.