It's been raining all day. But when it came time to pick Monkey up from kindergarten I didn't care about the weather. I thought, "Oh yeah? Forget you rain - we have these things called UMBRELLAS!"
And then Number Four and I left to walk to the school.
The first thing I quickly noticed was that a four year old yielding an umbrella makes not a pleasant walking companion. She was whacking me all over the place with that thing, because instead of watching where she was going she kept looking up at the center of the umbrella or down at her feet.
The second thing I noticed was that a day of downpour equals overflowing curb gutters. The flow of water was so wide that I had a hard time spanning them in one giant stride, and with a couple of little kids in tow we might as well have been crossing a river.
We made it to the school, got Monkey, and walked most of the way home with about as much annoyance as you can imagine in those particular circumstances. But then things got much more annoying.
We had just gotten over the gutter on one side of the road. Which meant that I had to close my umbrella, straddle the thinnest part of the gutter and then lift my kids, one at a time, over the flowing water. Not only is straddling a 3 ft wide flow of rain water not the easiest thing for a fat woman to do, but umbrellas went flying in the little hands of their lifted occupants. And I don't know about you, but I don't especially love getting a facer from a drenched umbrella.
We had just got onto the street, and just because we're lucky, a car turns the corner down the block and starts heading towards us. And this car is not going slowly (even though we were on a residential road in a school zone - obviously that car was being driven by a jerk). So I was trying to quickly cross the street and lift the kids over the even wider expanse of running gutter water on the other side.
And then my kids decided to act like they'd never been on a road before.
Instead of waiting on the side of the road so I could hurry and lift them to safety, both kids start running in opposite directions. And by the sound of it, the car behind us isn't approaching any slower, and it was getting close (the jerk).
This only left one option: I grabbed onto whatever part of my kids I could reach, dragged their unwilling little bodies to the side of the road, which required the excessive umbrella combat, and threw them onto the sidewalk ignoring my own, now soaked, feet.
And the car zoomed past us. (HUGE JERK.)
And that is why next time it's raining, I will be driving.
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