Back to School Coffee Date
Oof. What a week! Monday was so painful that I needed a “double tea day” at Starbucks (tea plus a free refill.) Yes, we started school! Obviously we live in an “early” part of the country, and school started August 12. Growing up in Illinois, we always went back to school after Labor Day. My parents were both teachers, and there was kind of a collective family scream of “NOOOOOOO!” as Labor Day drew near. Now, my husband is a teacher, so the start of school affects him as well as my daughter, which means there’s a big shift for the whole family. My daughter was the only one excited to go back- my husband and I had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, back to the school year. At least that’s what it felt like when I set my alarm for 5:30 am on Sunday night. On the last day of school in May, I vowed that NO wakeups would start with a “5” for the entire summer, and I kept that vow. As the summer went on, I got up later and later, until by the end I was luxuriously sleeping until 7 or 7:30. This was only possible because, thanks to my calf, I wasn’t doing much running (sigh.) If you want to run in South Florida in the summer, you HAVE to get out early. But since I was either running very short distances, or not running at all, it didn’t really matter. I even went through a couple weeks where I saved my workout for after work. That was fine, because we didn’t have to worry about eating dinner at any special time. I realized that going to bed at midnight and getting up at 7:30 works much better for my body than going to bed at 10 and getting up at 5:30. Same hours of sleep, theoretically, but going to bed later and knowing I could get up later is more relaxing for me, and I slept much better. I love the IDEA of getting up super early, but the reality of it doesn’t work well for me. But, here we are. High school starts at 7:30, in spite of NUMEROUS studies showing that getting up that early is not good for teenager’s brains. A law has been passed in our area that high school has to start later, but it won’t go into effect until my daughter’s senior year (eye roll. Or, I guess better late than never?) The high school is only three miles away, but traffic is so horrendous the first couple weeks that we have to leave the house at 6:40. That gets her there pretty early, but if we leave ten minutes later we’ll sit in a gigantic car line for 20 minutes. Plus, after I drop her off, my daughter has to get in a long line to go through the metal detector. She gets VERY stressed out at the thought of being late, so 6:40 is our leave time. There is someone happy about the early mornings though: TGIF!!! What would you tell me over coffee? If you have kids, did they go back to school yet?