Just Simply Holly

WOW, I’m still sitting here thinking that some of the things that happened yesterday really couldn’t have happened!  I’ll give you the details of my Tuesday, but be warned, it will be LONG!

I had class yesterday morning at 8:00 AM.  Now, I knew that when I enrolled in this class that it was going to be a close call making it to class some days.  But I worked things out so that rather than taking my daughter to her bus stop, waiting for the bus, then waiting for the bus to leave after she has gotten on it, like I normally do, I instead leave when the bus is the next “vehicle” from the driveway that I wait in.  This allows me plenty of time to get over to the main road and hop on the turnpike.  As much as I dislike having to pay to drive on a road, taking the turnpike to school in the mornings cuts about 20 minutes off the drive, so in my opinion it’s worth the 50 cents it costs.

Yesterday, however, my husband decided that he wanted to come out to campus with me to see if he could salvage this semester and be allowed to beg himself into a few classes.  So he took out daughter to the bus stop, but rather than doing what I asked him to do and leaving when I leave on mornings that I have classes, he waited for our daughter to get on the bus then for the bus to back into the driveway, wait for traffic to pass and leave before he left to come back to the house and pick me up.  Under “normal” conditions it might not have been that bad.  But yesterday morning we had a sudden influx of wet and heavy snow that made the roads out here in sticksville BAD!  This meant that he didn’t get back here to pick me up to head to school until about 7:30, and the drive to school when I take the turnpike is 35-40 minutes under good conditions.  I knew I was going to be late to class, and I wasn’t happy about it at all!  I’m one of those people who is obsessed about having to be on time!  So much so that I am generally very early!  But I did my best yesterday morning on the ride to school to just keep my thoughts to myself.  After my husband had a HUGE scare last week driving to work where he did about nine 360’s after hitting a patch of black ice, I knew that giving him attitude about the fact that I was going to be late for school wouldn’t make things any better.  He did good though, and I ended up being less than 5 minutes late for class, so HUGE kudos to him!

Class went awesome, this class is, without a doubt, one of my favorite classes and the instructor makes it VERY fun!  While I was in class hubby was running all over campus trying to get signatures and approvals for the classes he decided that he wanted to take.  By the time I was done with class he had gotten everything set for two of his classes, which was actually pretty good!  I kicked in and helped him email the other instructors for their permission to enroll in the other two classes he wanted to take.  We then went to the coffee shop for a cup of coffee and a snack to wait and see if he’d hear anything back from either instructor quickly.  After finishing our coffee we jumped on a computer to check his campus email and sure enough he already had an answer back from one of them saying no problem.  So we printed out the email and headed over to the enrollment office to get things set for that class then headed to the bookstore to pick up his books and supplies for the three classes that he was enrolled in.  Once we got all of his books and supplies we headed for the car to head home.  It only took about 4 hours for him to get into three of the four classes he wanted to enroll in, which was quicker than I thought it would be!

we decided to go ahead and take the turnpike for the trip back home, something we normally don’t do since we’re not rushed for time.  I don’t know if it was just one of those things that was meant to be or what, but it turned out to be a drive that I won’t soon forget.

We had just gotten onto the turnpike and had driven about a mile when we both seen something brown fly across the road then seen a huge cloud of smoke.  Our thought was that it was a deer that ran out in front of a car, but we were half right.  There was no deer, but there was a van and they had a HORRIBLE accident!  The van crashed into the guard rail and came to a stop with part of it’s back end  out in traffic lanes.  We drove a little way past it then pulled over onto the edge of the road.  I was on the phone with 911 while my husband ran back to see if whoever was in the van was OK.  It was obvious from looking at the front end of the van that it was a fairly serious accident because the front end was basically not there any longer.  There was just one person in the van, a woman that I would say was in her early 50’s.  She seemed to be OK, with no major injuries, but the air bag had really slammed into her face and she had a bloody nose and it looked like her lip was cut.

My husband helped her walk to our car and we had her sit down in the back seat.  It was horribly cold and the wind was blowing and we just thought that it would be best if she could sit down somewhere warm.  I stayed with her in the car while my husband and 2 other drivers that had stopped helped to direct traffic away from hitting her van again.  We waited with her until the State Trooper told us it was OK to leave the scene.  I just felt so bad for this woman.  She didn’t live around here and was about 2 1/2 hours from home.  But I was glad that we were able to help her and I hope that I was able to comfort her and make her realize that things could have been much worse.  We finished our trip home with a completely different outlook on life.  If we’d have been a minute further down the road we could have easily have been involved in this accident, rather than simply witnessing it.  Amazingly when it happened, there were no other cars in the lanes near her, so no one else was involved.

When we got home I knew that I needed to deal with a situation that happened with my son last Thursday.  Last week was exam week for him and on Thursday, he was to have gone to school a half day.  I had classes until 12:30 last Thursday and left the house before he got on the bus.  We had gotten a light snow that morning and when I got home from school I immediately noticed the absence of any type of prints in the snow in the driveway.  My first thought was that my son hadn’t let the dogs out when he got home from school.  But as I was standing outside with the dogs when I let them out it hit me that not only were there no prints from the dogs in the snow, there were also no shoe prints in the snow from where my son would have walked up the driveway when he got off the bus.

When I got the dogs in the house I questioned him as to whether or not he had gone to school.  He insisted that he had, but the evidence was telling me otherwise.  I grabbed the phone and called his school to talk to the attendance office to see if they could tell me whether or not he was in school that day, but the attendance office was already closed and wouldn’t be reopening until Tuesday morning.  I explained to my son about how all of the evidence I had pointed to him not going to school and gave him the chance to tell me the truth, but he continued to insist that he had indeed gone to school.  I then told him that he had until Tuesday to change his “story”, but that if I found out he was lying when I called the school on Tuesday there would be some severe consequences including having his computer not just taken away, but completely taken apart so that it wasn’t even at his desk.  He still insisted that he had gone to school.

So when we finally made it home yesterday, I knew that I couldn’t put off calling my sons school and finding out.  The attendance office let me know that not only was he not in school Thursday, but that he had missed two exams.  Since he missed the exams that meant that he failed them and failing the exams also meant that he had failed the classes.  This information started a chain of events that included my reading IM conversations that my son had online, checking text messages and phone calls from his cell phone and ended with my husband and I having a horrible feeling that our son was freaking out over the reality of the consequences he knew he was facing and was planning on having someone come to his school to pick him up and him taking off.  We headed to his school with two goals, the first was to physically see him so that we knew he hadn’t taken off (we did and he hadn’t) and the second was to talk to his guidance counselor to find out what our options were.

I am not the type of parent that goes around thinking that my child is innocent!  Not even close!  I live with my children and have spent the bulk of their lives with them and I know that they can be complete and total TURDS!  But I was totally blown away when my son STILL insisted that he had gone to school Thursday.  He then went on to say that there were several students, himself included, whose exams had been “lost” and that attendance had been taken by the exams, not by whether they were actually there.  He asked what he could do to prove to me that he was right and the school had made a mistake.  I racked my brain as quickly as I could to try and come up with something, ANYTHING, that would be possible for him to do, when I had one of those “AHA” moments.  I looked at him and said, “Bring me a hand written note from your teachers that says that some exams have been lost and that they do remember you being in class Thursday”.  Easy enough, right?  OMG, you’d have thought that I asked him to run through school naked with the halls full of his peers.

Anyway, this could go on and on, it was a HORRIBLE night with my son having a HUGE attitude!  But my husband and I realized that we needed to let him work through his anger, so as long as he wasn’t saying or doing something that hurt anyone or anything, we let him do what he thought he needed to do.  Around 8 or so, he finally calmed down and came out here and sat down next to my desk.  He had tears in his eyes and he looked at me and said two simple words, “I’m Sorry”.  It is probably the only admission of what happened that I will get from him, but that’s OK, it’s a start.  Now I just have to figure out what I can do to help him make up the failed classes.