Tuesdays

Thanks to the warm reception from all you urbanmoms this week, I’m going to try blogging for a second time.  On Monday, when I was sharing the horror of my upcoming week, I mentioned that Tuesdays deserve a blog all their own…so here it is. I’m sure many of you will see yourselves, riding right along in my minivan with me, although unfortunately, it will have to be a figurative trip as we have no physical room for you in the car.

Tuesday nights are dance nights.  Cupcake and step-daughter #2, who currently has no blog name, although Peaches was bandied about the dinner table, take Scottish Highland dancing about 10km north of us on Tuesday nights.   Now 10k is nothing in the city of Toronto.  A few subway stops, a hop,skip and jump from one "city" within the GTA to another. Normally, a 10 minute drive, at most. But dance is at 5, the height of traffic.  And the girls take their lessons with their cousins who live south of us, about another 10 km. 

A couple of important things to note about all of this are that a) I am thrilled that at 16 and 13, the girls have an activity that includes art, culture and physical activity and that they are keen to keep participating so I will do what it takes to make that possible for them and b) Tuesdays are the only nights that work for us and a night in which it is impossible for my sister-in-law to share the driving.  This I have accepted and fully embrace while steadily kicking myself in the head.

I work every other Tuesday. On those days, I leave from school at 4:00 with my step-son who at the moment, in true 11 year-old fashion has chosen a defensive "I don’t care" as his nom de blog and who usually starts our drive with front seat battles and what are we going to do for the whole time and why can’t he stay home alone and why can’t he stay at school, and is there a good snack in the car and all the other lovely conversations we all look forward to having after a long day at work and the beginning of a nightmarish activity drive.

We drive south to pick up the cousins first.  By 4:20ish we are driving north in rush hour traffic to pick up the other two dancers and the gaffer, my three year-old from daycare. Of course Cupcake and maybe Peaches aren’t in the same place because one has gone to mom’s after school to get ready, which makes perfect sense because mom’s house is closer to her school, and the other is at our house getting ready because it is closer to her school. The houses aren’t far apart so it’s not a huge deal but when has a teen girl ever been ready when you pull up to the house? And then there’s the gaffer who is several blocks east of our loop but must be picked up because babysitting will be closed before dance is over.

Thus, loaded with two cousins, one who gets queasy in the car, three step-children, one pre-schooler and usually some attitude about unfair seating practices and arguments about the radio, we head to our 5:00 dance lesson.  Which lasts an hour.

4 dancers pile out and two children along with one chauffeur are still in the car. We go to the mall, and I give in to junk food snack requests because it really is not fun for the two of them to do this tour with me and I field the barrage of questions that double as conversation for "I don’t care." Most of them cover the theme of why he has to be there in the first place.  It’s unfortuante that the youngest in the family can’t remember all the times the older siblings sat around at hockey arenas, baseball diamonds and swimming pools waiting for him.

We go back to dance, pick up our sweaty little artists and begin the drive home in choruses of hunger complaints and attempts to soothe a very frustrated gaffer. We drop the cousins off and since no matter how quickly we get home and whatever I may have had the opportunity to put in the slowcooker that morning would never be ready soon enough, we take turns choosing take out.  We’re usually home by 7 for shower, computer and homework wars, a full three hours after we started our journey.

One Tuesday a month I have Book Club after all of this and another Tuesday the executive of my mom’s group meets. On those evenings I do a drop and run at home and flop with a huge sigh when I arrive at my adult activities.

Some of this sounds more dramatic than it is. Some weeks Mr. Husband can pick up "I don’t care" from school. The weeks I don’t work, my sister-in-law drops the cousins here, cutting 1/2 hour off of our time. There are nights with few arguments, even none at all. And the girls really do seem to enjoy dancing and are preparing for their spring medals. 

I can’t say I enjoy Tuesdays and rarely do I experience those Hallmark moments of warm family bliss where we all break out in a chorus of "It’s A Small World Afterall", but we do get to dance and we get home and get fed and showered and homework done.  And we may even get in a moment or two of MSN and X-box. I don’t know what a parenting expert would say about our routine but Shakespeare would say, "All’s well that ends well."