I Missed My Train This Morning... and Missed More Than That

I missed my train this morning.  I'm handling it pretty well -- it's not ideal, but with trains every 20 minutes during the morning rush hour, I know I'll still get to work with enough time to settle in before my first meeting of the day at 9am.

I made a good effort to catch my target train, selecting the best lanes to progress up the main drag and taking a back road or two without hesitation when the lights didn't help my cause.  But I was down seven minutes from the start, and this ended up being too much time to overcome.  In the end, I managed to get myself parked and about halfway to the train when I saw it start to move forward.  I figure I missed it by two minutes, and that two minutes would have included a mad sprint (been done before) and paying my daily parking fee at a machine that... well, that doesn't understand the concept of sprinting to catch a train.

I can't really pinpoint exactly what it was that kept me from getting out the door seven minutes earlier than I did.  It was certainly a full morning, but I had a few mental time checks that I thought were keeping me on track.

The primary chunks of my pre-train mornings these days are:

1. Run.  I'm still working on getting in 600 miles for the year and realized at the start of November that I had about 120 miles to go.  Oops.  So I need to run and like getting my run in first thing in the morning.  I try to get this started no later than 5:30am; today it was 5:38am.
2. Fix lunches.  While I cool down from my run, I turn on Mike and Mike and make lunches.  I'm usually the only one up, so this is nice, quiet Mommy-only time.  I shoot to have this done before 6:30am; today it was 6:41am.
3. Shower and get dressed.  Dan would probably say otherwise, but I think I only need 20 minutes to do this.  If it takes me longer, it's because I'm lollygagging somewhere along the way... or maybe I decided to make the bed (if Dan didn't)... or maybe I just can't decide what to wear... or decide that what I thought I'd wear looks ridiculous... anyway, I shoot to have this done by 7am (earlier if I need to catch an even earlier train); today it was 7:14am.

Each one of those steps has wriggle room to catch up should I find myself behind.  If I don't finish my run until shortly after 6am, I still have plenty of time to fix lunches before 6:30.  If I don't get upstairs by 6:30am to get shower and get ready for work, I still have enough time to do the basics and be ready, as long as I'm up there by 6:40 or so.  Today, given that my day started a little later than my target start, I still should have caught eh 7:32.  So what went wrong?

The collection of little "things" is what went wrong:

1. I chose to make coffee for myself today.  I rarely do this any day and generally leave it to Dan; but today I made it.  It was cold outside and would keep me warm at the train station.  Dunkin'  Donuts hazelnut coffee.  Yummy.  This needed a couple of minutes of my time.
2. Cal's shoe was in a ridiculous quadruple knot, one that he couldn't get undone if he tried... which he sort of did.  It was a challenge for even me, an experienced knot undoer.  I needed to tackle this before heading upstairs for my shower else suffer the consequences of Cal's whining and worrying that Daddy might not give him his get-dressed star; and it took me a couple of minutes to undo it.
3. Ella needed help getting her dress down from the closet.  Yes, today she wanted to wear a dress, which is not really unusual but did it have to be her choice today?  It's the one piece of clothing that hangs in her closet is unreachable by her.  Dan was still sleeping, and I wanted to respect that; so I helped her get her dress.  What followed was a carefully executed exit from being her getting-dressed assistant -- leave too abruptly and suffer the consequences all-out whining and crying about having left without helping her; stay too long and find myself on a train departing after 9am.  I did exit gracefully and without consequence (I can't explain how), but it did take a couple of minutes to do so.
4. Ella insisted she needed help putting on her socks.  I resisted while I showered, suggesting that she do so herself and that I would not help her.  The day before, she had put her socks on herself, and I used this as my argument.  She didn't see the connection (or refused to admit she did, throwing out the fact that THESE socks had "strings")  Eventually (out of the shower and dressed) I found myself in a compromise -- I put one sock on her right foot, and she put the other one on her left.  It doesn't take me much time to put a sock on her, but it was certainly a distraction.
5. Ella talks a lot.  I mean, a lot.  This alone is a distraction.
6. Ella wanted a braid.  Normally, I volunteer it.  Today, I didn't.  She requested it as I stood at the vanity after my shower.  In my head it takes 10 seconds to do her braid; in reality, it takes a couple of minutes.  Despite my initial response of "if I have time," I couldn't say no.  So I took a couple of minutes to braid her hair.
7. When I made my way to the bottom of the stairs, Cal showed me what he had drawn

   

   Cal's "Mommy" Crayon Drawing

   on our crayon dry-erase board (which I still don't really understand how it's different than using traditional crayons on a traditionally markered dry-erase board).  It read "to Mommy from Cal" and had pictures of colored crayons on it.  Anything drawn specially for me, particularly labeled "Mommy," pulls at my heart strings, so naturally I had to take a picture of this.  The login and snapping of the picture probably took a good minute or two, again, unplanned.
8. And then there's the good-bye.  This actually went better than expected but required some quick pecks on the cheeks of my loved ones followed by a swift exit which involved putting on my coat and then grabbing my hat, gloves, lunch bag, backpack and purse, a collection of work whose effort to complete should not be understated.  I can't put a time on this other than to say it's more than what it takes to get out the door in the summer.

Clearly, it was the collection of little unplanned things that made me late which really means that it was my getting up 15 minutes later than planned that made me late.

Anyway, when I got into the car, the clock read 7:24am (it's a couple of minutes fast)... for a 7:32am train.  There really was no chance I'd make it.  I knew this, but I still tried.  Early in my attempt I re-thought it and considered going back.  This is because as I backed out of the driveway, the door to the garage opened; and my two fully dressed, coated and backpacked kids stood in the doorway watching me back out and drive away.  Cal on the right, Ella on the left.  The image of them would stick.  I don't know if they were saying anything, but I honked the car horn, waved goodbye and signed "I love you" to them.  No reaction.  They just stood there and watched me leave.  Had I admitted defeat early on, I could have taken the time to give them each a big hug.  I really like big hugs, especially with my kids.  What a great start that could have been to a morning.  I missed that this morning, even more than I missed my train.

Our Tooth Fairy is a Tightwad

When Cal lost his first tooth a couple of weeks ago, we found ourselves once again on unchartered territory.  Not only did we need to manage irregular but predictable visits from the Tooth Fairy, but also unexpected questions and scenarios involving the Tooth Fairy.

I know the drill: lose your tooth, put it under your pillow at night and find that money had replaced that tooth the following morning.  Easy enough, right?

Cal's smile minus his first lost tooth
(that's spaghetti sauce around his mouth)

Cal swallowed his first lost tooth.  That’s the leading theory, anyway.  He lost it at dinner time – he started his dinner with his tooth hanging on by a thread, visited the bathroom during dinner and then returned unknowingly without his tooth.  He didn’t pull it out; it fell out.  It wasn’t in the bathroom.  It wasn’t on the floor on the path to or from the bathroom.  It wasn’t on or underneath the dinner table, though Cal did try to convince us that a tooth-sized fleck of Styrofoam he had found on the floor was, in fact, his lost tooth.  It had to be in his belly or, at least, on its way.

I figure swallowing a tooth is nothing to be concerned about and assume it made its departure in a poop a few days later (which I made the mistake of saying aloud… to Cal… who laughed about it).  The only problem that I had with the swallowed tooth was that it wasn’t part of the drill.  Without a tooth, how does the Tooth Fairy know to visit?  Clearly I knew how the Tooth Fairy knew; but, without the tooth, how would Cal know that the Tooth Fairy knew?

This was an easy one to solve – we had Cal write a note to her to explain what happened, and he placed that note under his pillow that same night.

The Tooth Fairy visited him that night and replaced the note he had written her with a shiny Sacajawea one-dollar coin.

This didn’t measure up monetarily to the reports of other kids’ Tooth Fairies leaving them $5 or $10 a tooth; but it was at least different and, in the eyes of our Tooth Fairy, special and save-worthy.  Cal loved it, though I’m certain that Sacajawea coin is now either lost or sitting amongst the more traditional coins in his piggy (fish) bank.

Cal lost his second tooth before dinner last night.  Like the first, it had hung on by a thread for awhile.  This time, though, upon seeing a small pool of blood at the base of it, I mustered the mental (or stomach) strength to yank it out for him.  To call it a “yank” is misleading – I grabbed a paper towel, told him I just wanted to look at it and soak up some of the blood and then gently pulled it out for him.  It was so easy, he didn’t even know it.  And the fact that I didn’t even feel its release from his gums made it not so much the queasy event that I had made it out to be.

Despite having visions of his tooth falling into our garbage disposal, I rinsed his tooth with water in our kitchen sink and then plopped it into a shot glass.  No note would be needed for this lost tooth – Cal could place the actual tooth under his pillow for the Tooth Fairy to grab sometime while he slept.  To make sure that the Tooth Fairy could actually find and grab this tooth under his pillow (that tooth was smaller than it looks in his mouth), I eventually put it into a Ziploc bag; and Cal put the tooth-in-bag combo under his pillow right before he went to bed.

I woke up to my alarm at 5:07am today (I never set my alarm on a zero, an even number or a multiple of five) and lay in bed a couple of minutes before it hit me – I wasn’t sure the Tooth Fairy had visited Cal!  In a panic, I jumped out of bed and, instead of verifying by checking under Cal’s pillow myself, I woke Dan and asked him if he knew that the Tooth Fairy had visited Cal.  He nodded that he had; so, satisfied, I got into my running clothes and headed downstairs to get a run in on the treadmill.

A little over two miles into my run, a half-dressed Cal emerged on the stairs to the basement muttering something, which I eventually interpreted as the Tooth Fairy hadn’t visited him.  My first reaction was pissed off.  What question did Dan think I was asking him at 5:10am?  I could have addressed it then!  I then got my bearings and figured I should ask Cal a few questions before concluding that Dan had dropped the ball.  I stepped off the treadmill for a few seconds so I could focus and actually speak.

“You checked under your pillow?” I wanted to confirm he had.

“Yes,” Cal responded.

“And there’s nothing there?” more confirmation.

“No.”

“Is your tooth still there?” good question!

“No.”

“Okay, I’m sure the Tooth Fairy visited.  Go up and look again.” And then I told him where he could find a clean pair of pants.

Not even five minutes later, Cal re-emerged, fully dressed and holding a shiny coin for me to see.

“Is that from the Tooth Fairy?” I asked.

“Yes,” he responded without much excitement.

I focused on the coin in his hand.  It appeared to be silver.  The Tooth Fairy didn’t bring a Sacajawea coin this time.  It actually looked like a nickel, which both shocked and didn’t shock me all at the same time.  What a cheapskate!  Personally, I think a lost tooth is worth more than a nickel, so I was shocked that the Tooth Fairy would only leave a nickel.  I probably got more than a nickel when I was a kid!  And that’s forty years ago!  I also know that Dan wouldn’t necessarily think that a lost tooth is worth more than a nickel; and since he managed the Tooth Fairy visit this time, I wasn’t surprised last night's Tooth Fairy left only a nickel.

I continued to stare at this shiny coin in Cal’s hand as I finished my run.  Eventually he got close enough to me for me to see that it was actually a quarter he was holding.  A shiny quarter.  25 cents.  The same cheapskate thoughts I had about the Tooth Fairy leaving a nickel applied to him leaving a quarter.  Assuming this is precedent-setting, at a quarter a tooth, Cal will have a little over five dollars after he’s collected on his last lost tooth – “a little over” only because of that Sacajawea one-dollar coin he got for his first lost tooth… if he even still has it.  Five dollars for a full set of lost teeth.  That won’t even buy the smallest of Lego sets!

Yes, our Tooth Fairy is a tightwad.  Lucky for Cal, he can supplement the quarters our Tooth Fairy gives him with those which he earns for good behavior week over week.  And lucky for us, Cal still sees it that way and hasn't yet realized how cheap his Tooth Fairy is.