Really, The BEST Of Intentions

I had the best of intentions on Friday, really, I did. 

When I arrived at school that morning, I hit the ground running. Father's Day kind of slipped up on me, and I had been rushing all week to get the gifts made for my kids to give to their dads (or grandpas or other significant men in their lives). 

Naturally, I had had technical difficulties with getting photos I needed printed in the size I needed (thank you, Annie and Addison, for getting me past THAT hump). I neglected to take a picture of the finished product (which wouldn't have been finished without Annie's help - darn her for getting a "real" job and leaving me at the end of the summer to teach first grade), but they were river rocks (thanks, Vandine, for purchasing them for both of our classes to use), painted with acrylic paint (another thanks to Vandine for buying paint; I thought I had some - and I DID, but it turns out I only had white, black, and springy, Easter egg shades). A half-dollar sized photo of the child was glued onto the rock, "My Pop Rocks" was written on them, and then they were painted with Mod Podge for protection and an aesthetically pleasing glossy look (four more thankfuls to Annie for the circle cutting, gluing, writing, and Mod Podging). End product is a paper weight, if that's not already obvious, and it was a project I used to do with preschoolers at my previous school; in fact, my husband still has the one my daughter made nearly 20 years ago ("I can't throw it away - it has her picture on it").

If you followed that whole paragraph of the making of the paper weights, go back in time with me to the portion that says I had to have photos printed. After much frustration, I was finally able to get an 8x10 photo printed at Walgreens that was a collage of individual photos of each child (correction: all but TWO children, because it appears I left two of them off; the only good news is those students weren't at school that day, so their gifts to their pops were going to be belated anyway). That's one thankful for getting the collage made and printed, minus a thankful for leaving two photos off. The thankful math is getting as convoluted as this story.

So I drive to Walgreens to pick up the photo while the kids were outside with Annie and Addison. It was boiling hot outside, already 90 degrees at 9:30, so I texted Annie and said I would bring back candy and Sonic drinks. I was super proud of myself for using the Sonic app for the first time, ordering three Route 44 drinks (if you aren't familiar with Sonic, they are 44 oz drinks) for half price (also paying for them through the app), pulling into a stall, and getting them delivered to the car in a flash. The car hop brought them out on a tray, then seeing I was alone, asked if I would like a drink carrier. Hmmm, I thought, as I had just planned to stick them in the car's cupholders (foreshadowing here), that would make them SO MUCH easier to carry into school, so I said yes, he put the drinks into the drink carrier (the flat kind that pops into a 4-hole box with handle), and I put the drinks on the floorboard of the passenger side of the front seat and headed back to campus. One Diet Coke, one Diet Dr Pepper, one Vanilla Dr Pepper. Several thankfuls there.

It was only about a mile or two, straight down the main drag, and all was well until a traffic light ahead of me suddenly turned yellow. I am a rule follower, so I hit the brakes to stop at it instead of blowing through it like most people in town would have, and CRASH - the carrier tipped over to the right, dumping the drinks onto the floorboards. I threw the car into park, took off my seatbelt, said ALLLLL the bad words, and set the drink holder upright, but not without one of the cups losing its lid and spilling its contents all over the floor of the car.. I texted Annie that, due to a rapid stop at a light, I was now one drink down.

I continued down the road, CAREFULLY turned onto the road leading to the campus while bent over, my finger hooked in the edge of the drink carrier as I did so. Whew! I waited for traffic to clear, slowly, S-L-O-W-L-Y made my next turn, and CRASH - over it went again. I whipped into the parking lot of the school, set the carrier upright again, aaaaaand, another drink down.

I parked the car, texted Annie that I had lost yet another one, picked up the soggy drink carrier with two empty cups, one mostly full but quite battered cup, the photo I had printed, and the candy and trudged, dripping, into the building. I set everything down in the room (Annie and Addison were trying not to laugh at my idiocy, but they were unable to hide it), told them I didn't know whose drink it was that actually survived, and went back outside to deal with the car.

As I approached my car from the passenger side, armed with a trash bag and a roll of industrial paper towels, I saw that a small stream of soda was actually running out the bottom of the passenger door onto the parking lot. Running. Out. The. Car. Door.

Opening the door, I was greeted with about a half inch of soda with crushed ice swimming around in it; the rest of the soda (and let us remember that it was 88 OUNCES OF LIQUID) was both UNDER the floor mat or absorbed INTO the floor mat. I swear that floor mat weighed ten pounds when I pulled it out of the car and dropped it onto the parking lot. I used the paper towels to absorb all the liquid I could out of the floor board (turns out "all I could get" was less than a sufficient amount), then dragged the floor mat to the front steps of the building, leaving a trail of soda across the parking lot. I lifted the mat up by the corner to rinse it off, and soda continued to pour, POUR, out in a stream onto the ground, so much that I could have refilled one of the cups with it. I'm really thankful that we had hoses hooked up to the spigot in front of the building (thank you, Ceason, for buying new hoses to use for summer water play, watering the garden, and the occasional washing of car mats that have absorbed half a gallon of soda) and I rinsed and rinsed and rinsed and RINSED and was able to declare them relatively soda-free (and a lot cleaner than it was before). I laid it out to dry (didn't take long in that heat, by the way) and finally returned to my classroom.

By this time, my kids were already sitting down to lunch (thanks again, Addison and Annie). I walked into the room, sweaty and disheveled, feet sticky, hair wild, and asked which of the three different drinks survived the trip. In unison, they said, "Yours." Oops.

So, see? I really DID have the best of intentions by getting the drinks to offset leaving to get the photo while Annie and Addison supervised the little nugs on the playground. I tried, I really did. 

A swing and a miss.

Trail o' soda

This was a live photo and was easier 
to see that way, but you can see the
stream of soda pouring from the lower
right corner

I took this selfie as I was heading out
on my errand because I was having
a really good hair day. I did not take
an after photo, but I can assure you
it was the opposite of this....

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