Earning My School Mom Badge

On Sammy’s very first day of school 2 years ago, he stepped off the bus carrying a backpack. It just wasn’t his backpack. It took a week of phone calls and a visit to the bus depot (joy for the boy!), but we managed to retrieve his backpack. The one with his name emblazoned with giant red letters on it. Still not sure how that one slid by.

Fast forward to the final day of the first week of preschool, the first week in which Sammy must bring his own lunch every day in his smart little (self-selected) lunchbox. This appears to be one of the best things about preschool in his eyes. (He likes to recount every tidbit in his lunch, as though some lunch fairy magically packed it instead of me.) I picked him up as usual, thankful for the carpool line so I didn’t have to get out of the car on this unusually rainy day, and we made our way home. Once inside, I moved in to examine his backpack for teacher notes and break down his lunch kit, lest any food bits remain to breed lovely presents over the weekend. Something was up as soon as I touched that lunchbox. Too light. So I unzipped the case to find it completely empty. As in, no thermos. No thermos that I specifically purchased for its ease of use for small hands and distinct lack of leakage (a key feature all you mothers will agree I’m sure). This is an awesome thermos. I want one myself.

“Sammy, where’s your thermos?”

“What thermos?”

“The thermos you took to school in your lunchbox with your juice in it.”

“…”

“Did you leave it at school?”

“…”

I decided to take a jovial approach.

“Sammy, is it in the trash can.”

“Yah.”

Surely his focus on this line of questioning had rapidly deteriorated to the point he wasn’t even listening anymore and was giving me a patently teenaged response of agreeing by default. Certainly he’d neglected to put the thermos back in the lunchbox and his teacher would have found it and put it aside. My mind quickly went through the options: call up to the school, wait until Monday and collect it from the chuckling teacher, go back up to school in the rain with both kids and march into the school to find it sitting on the teacher’s desk. I really didn’t want to take option #3. But what if, just what if, on the off chance, the thermos was in the trash can? It was go now or dig through a dumpster later. Replacement was not an option – have you not been reading me? I’m too cheap and this is one the first week of school, for heaven’s sake.

So option #3 it was. Off we trouped, slipping and sliding into the school and through the hallways already being vacuumed (I was thankful they hadn’t locked the doors even though it was only 10 minutes after dismissal – what can I say, I was paranoid). I did a quick scan of the classroom and didn’t see anything. I asked the teacher if she had found it, completely expected her to tell me that yes, of course she had it, and was waiting for me/didn’t expect to see me until Monday. But she didn’t have it, nor had she seen it. I could feel a tiny panic start in my stomach (see: paranoid, also, cheap and crazy). So I asked Sammy again, “Is your thermos in the trash can?” He walked over to the trash with us following, reached in, and extracted a slightly dirty thermos. It was quite the tableau at that exact moment: Sammy, proud of his discovery, me, relieved to have the item in question back in my possession (so I didn’t have to go buy another one, and not on sale this time) (still cheap), the teacher, slightly aghast that she hadn’t seen Sammy throw it away with the rest of his lunch refuse.

The teacher apologized for not watching things more closely, but she needed have done so. I can’t keep an eye on my 2 kids every moment, so I have no idea how they do it with 12. I’m just glad I went ahead and against the little voice in my head that told me I was nuts for bothering.

Sammy is now sick of repeating the statement, "My thermos goes in my lunchbox, not in the trash can.”

I’m trying not to think about what I'll have to do next week.