Handsome Hubby drew the short straw this morning.

Conner will not get out of bed in the morning.
He has AC-DC’s Back In Black album in his CD alarm clock… Blaring.
Nope. He’ll lay there, bleary eyed and listening, but he won’t get out of bed.

He’s gotten up to “make his bed” (can you see my “air quotes” here?) but all he does is collapse back on top of it, with his feet on his pillow and his head at the foot of the bed and go back to sleep. I told him the bed making can wait until he’s been up and around a little bit. Now he just climbs down the ladder from the top bunk and lays down on the bottom bunk. (And on top of Grant….)

We’ve even doused this kid with water.
Not as effective as we would have hoped.

The new rule is that he has to walk out the door by 8:00. Every minute past 8:00 = 5 push-ups. He leaves at 8:03? That’ll be 15 push-ups. (As of today he owes us 170 push-ups.)

This morning he was so behind schedule that he wanted to save time by not making his lunch. Each kid is given money to buy his lunch in the cafeteria one time each week, (and one time only.) If they want to buy each day of the week, we’ll pay for 1 day, but they pay the other 4. (I don’t jump through hoops, finding deals on healthy lunch stuff so that they can forgo it for more expensive, less nutritious, “ketchup counts as a vegetable” school lunches!)

He sat, waiting for Handsome Hubby to finish getting ready, so he could ask HH for lunch money. I was in the same room. I usually have $2.75 on me. He could have asked me.

Instead he waited….
He didn’t gather his stuff while waiting.
He didn’t put on his shoes while waiting.
He didn’t make his bed while waiting.
He just sat, like a proverbial bump on a log. Ugh!
He walked out the door with his lunch money and an additional 30 push-ups added to his tally.

About 15 minutes after he left, the phone rang. We did not recognize the number on the caller ID. It was Conner. On someone’s borrowed cell phone (because he can’t remember where his is, or if it’s charged, or whatever…) He has crashed his bike and he is OK, but his “pants” (what he insists on calling shorts) have ripped from top to bottom. Help! Can we bring him a new pair and can we go to school with him to sign him in because he will be tardy….

HH was on the way out the door anyway. I give him a new pair of shorts and off he goes. Conner has told him he is in the park and when HH asked “where exactly?” Conner informed him that he was “parallel to the park.”

WTF, parallel to the park?

HH drove around the park block a time or two, scanning the grounds, looking for Conner.

Besides teaching Conner that pants are not the proper word for shorts, we also need to teach him that parallel to the park is not the proper term for ACROSS THE STREET FROM THE PARK!!!! Duh!

HH grabs him and the bike and drives him the rest of the way to school. Conner changes his shorts, gives the ripped pair to HH and HH signs him in at the attendance office.

As he gets back out to his car to finally head in to the office, HH realizes there is something in the pocket of the ripped shorts…. Conner’s lunch money.

ugh.