A Butterfly Flaps It's Wings and All That.....

It's funny how sometimes someone passing through your life can affect you.

In junior high school there was this kid who was in a lot of my classes. He was one of those kids that never really seems to fit in anywhere. And we tortured him.

I think that age group is really brutal anyway. I don't think anyone really gets out of junior high without being victimized by someone at some point... even the most "popular" kids have to deal with it.

But this kid got it bad. He was awkward and had a bit of a know-it-all attitude and he didn't wear the right clothes... all of it. He was by every definition, a dork.

In high school he continued to be on the outskirts of social acceptance, but luckily in high school the torment seems to die down and I think in the larger school he found some kindred souls and things probably weren't so bad for him. But he and I were never really friends.

Later on, I discovered that my very own The Man actually had a distant friendship with this guy - a friend of a friend sort of deal. I remember talking with The Man about how ridiculed he was in junior high and how I felt a lot of regret for my part in the bullying that this guy had endured. The Man was somewhat surprised, letting me know that he felt this guy was actually a really nice guy.

After we were all grown up and starting lives of our own, his mom had another baby. A little girl. And as fate would have it, some years later this little girl ended up in my daughter's Brownie troop.

At one meeting his mom arrived to pick up her daughter and I introduced myself. I let her know that I had gone to high school with her son and that my daughter really enjoyed being in the same troop with her daughter.

I remember her eyes lighting up and she reached out and hugged me! She told me that her son had told her so much about me and how happy she was to have met me.

Now, I can only imagine what her son must have said about me... it just couldn't have been good.

But she hugged me and genuinely seemed happy to meet me.

And that really touched me.

Not even a year later I learned that she lost her battle to cancer. Her young daughter and my school mate had lost their mother, who was so obviously a great woman. And it's just boggling how our lives had interconnected over the years and how meeting her changed the way I look at my own life.

It made me look at how I had treated her son, at how The Man had viewed her son so differently than I had viewed him. It made me think about her daughter, so much like my own daughter, having to grow up without her mom. And how, as a mother she could so genuinely accept someone who had previously been cruel to her own son.

The five minutes I spent with her in the living room of my daughter's Brownie leader has changed the way I will raise my own children, an impact that is immeasurable.

Those gifted kids are big babies!

Here in the middle of the third week of school I think I've finally got a bit of a routine going as far as transportation goes.

7:15 AM - Watch Bug board school bus
7:20 AM - Drop Goober at Pre K
7:25 AM - Drop Munchkin at school
7:35 AM - Home and back in bed starting work

The afternoon is a little more chaotic.

2:15 PM - Walk 1/2 mile to Munchkin's bus stop
2:25 PM - Grab Munchkin and walk 1/2 mile + 20 feet to Bug's bus stop
2:30 PM - Wave as Bug's bus passes us on the street
2:35 PM - Arrive at Bug's stop and wait as bus loops around entire huge neighborhood and gets back to his stop because school district doesn't believe an 8 year old can walk 20 feet on a sidewalk to his home all by himself. Whatever.
2:45 PM - Melt into pool of sweat on sidewalk. Get Bug and walk the 20 feet home as a group.

Then we do our homework and I clean up the house a bit and before I know it it's 5:00 and time to drive up to the pre-school and grab Goober. At home I throw together dinner and we all eat.

I'm sort of starting to see some organization here! Exciting, indeed.

Today, I was feeling a little under the weather and I took the van to pick the kids up at their bus stops.

Both stops are pretty active ones. Traffic is fairly light and similar at both stops and about 10 to 15 kids get off at both stops. Both stops are for elementary school children.

At Munchkin's stop all the SUVs and minivans line up on both sides of the road, the bus pulls up, the parents all sit in the vehicles with them running, and the kids go right to their respective cars and get in all by themselves.

At Bug's stop all the SUVs and minivans line up on both sides of the road, the bus pulls up, the parents all spring joyously from their vehicles and grab their children by the hand and walk them to their cars making sure each child is buckled securely before leaving the stop.

I was sort of surprised when all the parents got out of their cars to walk their children from the bus. These are not kindergartners, either. Most kids appear to be at least in 2nd grade or older. The difference, however, is that these children are all in the gifted program.

At first I figured it was just a product of parents being sheep. You know, one mom got out of the van to run to the bus and all other parents followed suit because we all have that innate fear inside of us that we're not doing a good job and that we need to be veritable June Cleavers.

But then I wondered if it had something to do with the type of parents that end up with gifted children. Are parents of gifted kids more coddling than parents of non-gifted kids? Are parents of gifted kids more protective? Are they better? Are they more hands on?

I'm not more of a coddler and I'm definitely not more protective. I'm of the mind that if they're screaming they're still breathing. Does that make me a better or worse parent? I don't know... I think it just means I'm raising my children more independently. I hope that they don't expect to be babied for every little boo boo they get in life, yanno?

So Bug ran to the car all by himself. He made it just fine.