Tell me this isn't sensible

A few weekends ago we went to a college football game with two other couples. While the guys focused on the game and their beer consumption, we chicks did what we do best: multitasked. We chatted, gossiped, gawked at the surrounding fans, sent text messages, snacked and glanced down at the field every so often - usually when people started booing or clapping - just to say we did.

Somewhere around the end of the second quarter, while I was noshing on a hot dog and Ruffles, my girlfriends, whose children attend the same preschool, started talking about their 12:00 pick-up time. Seems my one friend was on a mission. What had started as a simple desire to arrive in a timely manner had turned into an unspoken competition with several other stay-at-home moms to see who could arrive the earliest to pick up their kids. She said she'd started getting there around 11:30 and she still wasn't the first one there. And she was pissed about it.

This, gentle reader, is when I asphyxiated courtesy of the previously mentioned wiener and chips. Suddenly, I felt faint. The voices around me melded into the roar of the crowd, the bright colors washed away from my vision and my limbs tingled.

When I came to, I started relating the weirdness of the experience: that while unconscious, I dreamt that my friend had said she'd been showing up more than half an hour early to pick her kid up from preschool FOR NO GOOD REASON. Can you imagine? I marveled. They looked at me kinda funny, then proceeded to offer me a vodka and soda.

I'm still reeling in amazement.

Where's John Stossel when you need him?

Can we talk about my kid getting kicked out of school today? Can we talk about how you're assuming that I'm referring to Miss Bugglehub in a Dress, when in fact I'm talking about What the Hell Happened to My Precious Baby Boy?

Apparently he's a hitter.

Today, I had already killed half my morning by taking Bugglegirl on her very first dental appointment (I'm not complaining, it was adorable), only to return to the preschool co-op to learn that Buggleboy was on an apparently-uncontrollable, violent rampage: he bonked two four-year-old girls on the head with a toy. There were tears, and allegedly an indentation. He needed constant supervision to avoid further confrontation, and the co-op was shorthanded. The implication was clear: either I stay in order to restrain my incorrigible, antagonistic child, or I remove him from the premises. I knew I shouldn't have dressed him in that black trenchcoat from Baby Gap.

Don't get me wrong; I was mortified. Certainly his behavior was unacceptable. It's left me wondering where my sweet, obedient son went. Lately he's been going limp when he doesn't want to be picked up, and throwing himself on the floor, screaming in dramatic disgust, when he's upset. In other words, he's been acting like an almost two year old. As for the violence, I have noticed that he's started standing up to Bugglegirl, the eight by ten section of den in front of the TV transformed into a coliseum of sorts, a place where two gladiators attempt to fight to the death, or at least until Mommy finishes applying concealer and a coat of mascara. It ain't pretty. But expulsion-worthy? Give me a break.

No, really - PLEASE - give me a break. I live for Monday and Wednesday mornings. Never mind that I end up spending a good percentage of them helping out at the co-op, or shuttling one kid to an appointment, or trekking who knows where for some b.s. work thing that never pans out. It's still a much-needed respite from the daily monotony, a welcome opportunity for me to use the restroom without a cheering section and a chance for the kids to interact with peers and become familiar with paint - that colored, stain-making stuff that Mommy won't allow in the house.

Obviously, I really didn't have a choice. There was no way I was getting suckered into watching six rugrats and possibly changing a foreign poo diaper just to avoid running errands with my kid. So I took Buggleboy to Target, where he cried when I wouldn't let him play with the stocking stuffers I tried unsuccessfully to keep hidden in the cart. If this whole debacle blows the lid off of Santa, I'm gonna be pissed.