Admittedly I am a procrastinator. I always studied for school tests the night before and never any sooner. I never pay bills early. I leave my house for work 5 minutes before I am supposed to be there. I still have boxes of things to go through from moving over three months ago. I was even born in the evening because I apparently couldn’t make it happen any earlier. So it’s funny that one of the most important things to make single parenting work is timing.

Thank goodness I have older kids. At 6 and 9, my kids are capable of getting themselves ready for school with only a little help from me. This allows me to get ready for work at the same time they get ready for school. I wake up before they do to have my coffee and breakfast, and maybe throw a load of laundry in. Then I go back upstairs to wake them up. This is the time I spend on my hair and make-up, because if I go back downstairs they will inevitably go back to bed. So I stay up there close to their room so I can yell at them every 5 minutes to get out of bed if they don’t want me to pull them out myself. My daughter, the oldest, is always done first. She helps out by pouring two bowls of cereal, one for herself and one for her brother. I am busy picking out my clothes and encouraging my son to wear warmer clothes on this October morning than just the underwear he is wearing now, and then vetoing the shorts and t-shirt he picks out next. When he is finally dressed and I have finished sorting through all the clothes I have piled on my bed for my own outfit, I go back downstairs. I make my lunch, my daughter makes hers, and my son bounces a ball against the wall repeatedly until I threaten to throw it across town.

I spend the last 20 minutes asking them if they are indeed ready for school. My 9 year old is, my 6 year old remembers that he doesn’t have his socks on. Then he remembers that he doesn’t have any clean socks. So I check the dryer for his socks. But I can only find one sock from all different pairs. And that’s when he remembers that he put them all under his bed when he cleaned his room, so they never actually made it into the laundry basket. So I contemplate whether I should give him a pair of his sister’s socks to wear, see if there are any dirty socks that aren’t really that dirty, or if I can make a pair of socks out of two mismatched sock without it being too obvious. I go with the third option, and give him one long and one short white sock. But that’s when he remembers that there is one more pair of socks in his shirt drawer.

This process takes up 10 minutes, leaving us with only 10 minutes left. I ask again if they are both ready for school. My daughter still is. My son remembers that he has to get his shoes on. But he can’t remember where they are. We find one under the couch. It makes sense that the other should be somewhere in the vicinity of the couch. But it’s not. So we look in the shoe basket on the stairs. Not there. Then we look under his bed. Not there either. We look in the cabinet where he stores all his toys, and as I have just discovered, all his socks. But the shoe isn’t there either. We look everywhere. But it is gone. So we go back to the couch as I calmly yell at the top of my lungs that we are going to be late and do not have time for this and I am going to send him to school without any shoes on at all and I am about to save a ton of money because I am never buying him shoes again. I do this with love. It is my belief a child can never receive too much love. And he promptly finds the missing shoe. Under the couch. It must have been all that love I heaped on him.

We have 5 minutes left. He wants to tie his own shoes even though I know he still needs to get his homework, lunch ticket, and snack into his backpack, and he needs to brush his teeth and put on a sweatshirt. And rather than fight him, I run upstairs and grab his sweatshirt and his toothbrush with toothpaste already on it. And as he is still making the tree and trying over and over to get the bunny to go around it and into the hole, I brush his teeth and instruct him that swallowing just this once won’t kill him because he is not spitting in my hand. After I rinse his toothbrush, he is still struggling with his shoe. So I grab the shoelaces and ignore his protests as I make that bunny go into the rabbit hole if he knows what’s good for him.

One more minute. I pull his sweatshirt over his head, give him his snack and homework, and tell the kids it’s time to go. That’s when my daughter starts looking for her shoes.

I heaped a lot of love on her, too.

They grab their backpacks and we all run out the door, the kids in their shoes and me in the closest things I could find - my slippers. I drop my daughter off at her school first, and then I drop off my son. They both made it before the first bell rang. And as I drove home, I think I took my first breath of the day. Once again, we made it. Our timing was impeccable. I had just enough time to finish getting ready at home and steal a few minutes with the newspaper and a second cup of coffee before heading off to work. And when I opened the door, the first thing I saw was my son’s lunch ticket on the floor that never quite made it into his backpack. I sent thoughts of love out to my son as I raced back to his school so he wouldn’t miss Pizza Day.

If you have any idea where socks go when they go missing, email me at winecountrymom@winecountrymom.com.