Sometimes you're just THAT family...

Oh, I should have known.

My three year-old had his first official visit to his new school today--a 30-minute "small group visit" which consisted of a handful of kids and their parents converging on the classsroom to get acquainted with one another, the teachers, blah blah.

Well, first of all, we show up twenty minutes late for our thirty-minute visit. We show up late because...aw crap. You know, let's be honest: because I'm late everywhere I go, okay? My three year-old happened to fight me on every. single. thing. this morning, but if I had my shit together I would have *accounted* for that.

Our morning was a little slice of--wait a minute. Shit. He's not three, he's two. Christ, there's no hope for me.

Hell. I was trying to brush lollipop stickiness out of Tavish's matted hair when we were supposed to be leaving, because *somebody* forgot to give the children a bath lastnight. Ok, I didn't forget. I was just sort of being a little lazy. Don't judge.

Ok, so we finally get there and it's all going fine: they don't seem to notice how late we are, how dirty his fingernails are, etc. Tavish goes right over to a toy and plays with it contentedly for a few minutes. Then it comes time to actually ask him to do something and it's a bunch of pure three year-old-ness: "No! I don't WANT to!"

Then he marches into the adjoining classroom and trashes it in about 40 seconds, while I scurry behind him saying things like, "Buddy, let's clean up the 40,000 beads you just left on the floor..." Suddenly he stops what he's doing, and at the *exact* moment I'm saying, "Do you need to go potty?" he pees all over the rug and the wooden truck he's playing with.

Naturally I've left my purse in the car, which has extra underwear and shorts. After I remove his soaked overalls and Thomas the Tank Engine underwear, he runs away from me with his dingaling flapping all over the place. But I can't chase him because I'm cleaning up pee with those school papertowels that have the absorbency of oak leaves.

From the other classroom I hear him doing his characteristic scream-cry, and I rush in to find him trying to force his foot back into a sandal, which he had, for some odd reason, felt compelled to take off immediately after we'd arrived. (And when the teacher had quietly and politely asked him why he was taking his shoes off he'd yelled, "Because I WANT to!" Nice manners, Dude. Thanks. These people are going to think your father and I must be Neanderthals.)

As I run into the room, a well-meaning father I don't know is bending over in an attempt to help this apparently parentless child, but I guess he didn't know Tavish was naked from the waist down until he got down to his level because I see the man reaching out, saying, "Hey little buddy, can I help--" and then recoiling, mumbling, "Oh, gosh, uh..." "Hi!" I say to the dad, "We're the Mulligans!" And don't ask me to remember what he said his name was.

Then the head of the school comes in. She's friends with my parents and knew me as a girl, so I always feel a little compelled to show her how lovely my children are, but she always seems to catch me at the most awkward moments. Like this one: one of the teachers is gently offering my half-naked child some extra underwear and pants, and he's screaming, "NOOOOO!!! NOOOOO!!!" like he's being branded.

Everyone in the room is staring at us. I paste on a smile, scanning the walls for a clock, as I wrestle my kid back into his pee-soaked overalls. Mother of God, shouldn't this be over already? Then people start leaving. Oh, thank the Lord.

Then panic. Where the fuck are my keys??