Parades, Parades, Parades

I’m at school with the car.  Jack’s at preschool.  Liam is at home with the nanny.  The nanny has a noon class, so I have to relieve her at 11:45.  Jack needs picked up by noon at the latest, or they start charging a zillion bucks a minute.  So I have to leave my school, drive home and fetch Liam, then drive to Jack’s school and pick him up within the space of about fifteen minutes.  Our house is but a few minutes from the preschool, so while tight, this turnaround is doable.  Doable on a normal day, that is . . . Bum Bum BUUUUUMMMMMM!  (That’s called foreshadowing right there, folks.)

I embark on the first leg of my journey, and as I approach our house I’m hitting a surprising amount of traffic on the side roads.  There appears to be no difference in the width of the one way and two way streets in this city, so we’re all doing a lot of the old “pulling off to the side to let the other guy pass” maneuver, which is slowing me down.  It’s 11:42, and I’m about five blocks from home.  I inch my way down another block, and then I see the source of my trouble: a bunch of little kids bobbing along down the street, carrying banners and wearing costumes made of paper bags.  I hear the blat blat of an out of tune elementary school band brass section.  I remember this school parade from last year.  I remember the route, too – a circle of about a four block radius, with my house directly in the middle.  Curse these damn children and their stupid creativity and annoying community involvement.

I’m in a crush of cars all trapped by the parade, and I have to get to both of my children in two different places in about six minutes.  I’m not, like, carrying a kidney in an ice chest here, nobody’s waiting for a life saving transplant, but I don’t want Rebekah to have to miss her class, and I don’t want to pay a zillion bucks a minute for being late to get Jack.  So I reverse out of the line of traffic, park illegally in front of someone’s driveway (he’s not going anywhere right now), jog four blocks home, breathlessly apologize to Bekah for making her late, jog four blocks back to the car (with 22 pounds of literally bouncing baby boy in my arms), throw Liam in the carseat, drive – er – creatively to extract myself from the crush, and then zoom on over to get Jack.

I was 7 minutes late.  But they didn’t charge me.  Phew.