Notes from a Blue Bike by Tsh Oxenreider

Author:Tsh Oxenreider
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2013-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-SIX

Store-Bought Offerings

Bend, Oregon, January 2013

I dug up the calendar on my phone in between packing lunch boxes and gathering backpacks. Sure enough, I was on snack duty in Reed’s class that day. I remembered this now; I had signed up for early January because he’d be out of school during his birthday over Christmas break, and the most fun he could’ve imagined was being at school for his birthday so he could pass out cupcakes to his classmates. Today was a belated birthday celebration.

But unlike early September, when a reminder like this would have tangled my insides into a knot at the beginning of our new year at a “regular” school, I shrugged it off and kept on slicing apples for lunch. Tate had to be at school in fifteen minutes, and I still needed to write a check to the school office, gather my writing supplies for a morning at the library, and start a load of laundry.

Kyle came downstairs with our mostly dressed toddler in his arms. “You about ready to head out?” he asked. He sat down on a dining room chair with Finn on his lap and started wrestling on his tiny socks and bowling shoes (Finn had a thing for bowling shoes).

“Yep,” I answered. “But so you know, we’ve gotta head to Whole Foods after we drop off Tate. Reed needs to bring cupcakes to his class today.”

Kyle froze for a second to absorb the info, nodded, and then kissed Finn on the head. “Well, all right then. We’ll go to Whole Foods.”

The two-year-old ran out the back door to play outside; then the babysitter walked in the front, ready to start her morning with our boys.

Kyle and I took Tate to her school, then headed to the store to pick up cupcakes before Kyle dropped me off at the downtown library. He’d deliver the snack to class in a few hours, when he brought Reed to his afternoon preschool class.

An uneventful morning, but it was monumental for me. The kids had been at the school for five months, and I was perfectly okay with these store-bought offerings, not once considering that I could transfer the cupcakes to a plate and cover it with tinfoil so the teacher would assume I’d baked them. Sure, I would have liked to bake cupcakes—they taste better, they’re healthier, and Reed would have probably enjoyed time in the kitchen with me. But I wasn’t going to lose sleep over it. Buying cupcakes instead of making them was a small compromise I was willing to make in return for staying sane.

It was the middle of our school year, the one that followed our year of homeschooling. When I wasn’t running my business or joining Kyle in our fixer-upper home renovation, I was taking the kids to school three times a day, signing papers, testing spelling words, attending school concerts, and cheering on my kids as they ran for their school’s fund-raiser. They were all things I’d never done the previous year, as a homeschool parent.

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