So here's the story. Topher usually walks home from school. It's only about a half mile and I usually meet him half way at the gate into our neighborhood. However when it's bad weather I will go pick him up. He can literally walk home much faster than the time it takes me to wait in the zoo that is his school pick up. Often it’s happened that I spend 30 plus minutes picking him up to spare him from having to walk home in a little snow only to have him come home and immediately go outside to play in said snow. So today, knowing that it might snow in the afternoon, I told him rather firmly, “You are walking home today- no matter the weather. If it’s really bad I’ll call the office and let you know that I’ll be coming to get you, but if you don’t get that message then you are walking. Understand?”
At 12:55 the weather is beautiful. It’s warm. The sky is clear. I don’t give it a second thought and I lay down with Liam (who is sick) to try and get him to take a nap. I doze off for a bit and wake up 20 minutes later to a FREAKING BLIZZARD. Seriously the picture doesn’t do it justice. It was windy and snowing these huge wet flakes. By now it’s 1:25, school just got out. It’s too late to call the school and even if I woke up Liam and drove to the school by the time I got there Topher would be in the neighborhood and I would have woken up my monster toddler for nothing.
So I called the mom of one of his classmates. She was at the school and said she would send her son to go find Topher and then she’d give him a ride home. I was a little relieved. But 10 minutes later she called and said the Topher refused to go with Paul because of how strongly I laid down the law earlier. They actually got in a little fight about it. Paul said, “there’s NO WAY your mom would make you walk in this!!” To which Topher said something along the lines of, “You don’t know my mom!”
I ended up driving to the edge of the neighborhood. I parked and ran across the field and through the gate where I saw him 50 yards away. He was the only kid walking home- usually there’s a few dozen kids with him. As soon as he saw me he screamed, “WHAT THE HECK, MOM?! WHY?” He was sopping wet- from his pants to his hair to the inside of his back pack.
We went home and I gave him hot chocolate and he was over it in a matter of 5 minutes. But he told me later that when he first came out of school and saw how bad it was he thought, “Mom must be really mad at me to make me walk home in this.”
