School Pick-Up

I arrange my entire schedule around school-pick-up. I can’t pick up my bambinos every day (not even close), but the majority of days I do. It means an insane daily calendar, and it means dragging my kids with me to some late-afternoon-meetings-and-events, and it means overcompensating with some very late nights with me working into the wee hours, and it means a lot of juggling, but it is something I’m committed to, and something I feel is worth the craze it creates.

When I first started on the faculty at Lehigh I had a colleague whose wife was a psychologist. She knew a lot about child development, parenting, and family counseling. She also had raised three boys and done what seemed — at least from all outside appearances — to be a superb job of it. Years ago, before I even had kids of my own, I asked her once at a dinner party — “So, what is your biggest piece of parenting advice?” (This is one of my favorite questions to ask people.) She told me: “Be the one to pick up your kids from school.” She went on to explain that doing whatever it took to be the one to get them off the bus, or pick them up for the drive home, was her #1 parenting tip. “They’ll tell you more in the first twenty minutes after school than they’ll tell you in the next 20 hours. In that first twenty minutes you’ll consistently find out more about their day, about their thoughts, about their feelings, and about them, than you will at any other time. And once they’ve said it once, they won’t say it again. So, you only have that one twenty minute shot each day.” It really struck me. And stuck with me. And when my kids became school age, school-pick-up became the axis on which my entire calendar is arranged.

Crazy, I know.

But, in my experience, my colleague’s wife was crazy right! As it turns out, the bambinos’ school is a twenty-minute drive from home. They could take the bus, but we all choose for us to drive it instead. Braydon drives them to school each morning. And I covet and cherish those twenty minutes in the car with them each afternoon. There are days we can’t swing it, and days that Braydon and I have to switch, and days that the kids have to do extended care (After School Program), but most days, I get those twenty minutes in the car with them. And I feel like that’s a privileged sacred time I have with my three precious kids.

Whenever I can, I bring Dash with me for school pick-up. He loves it just as much as I do. He waits with me in the pick-up line, patiently sitting on top of the arm rest between the two front seats, eagerly peering out the front windshield awaiting a glimpse of one of his three favorite people on earth. With his eyes peeled he sits at full attention as kid after kid walks out of the school. And then he spots his three! And, just like me, his ears perk up, his heart starts racing (I can feel it pounding through his chest!), and he starts getting antsy to greet them. He’s all over them when they climb in the car— just like their mama is. He’s got a wildly wagging tail, and I’ve got a million questions about their day, and we’ve got twenty minutes to bring them home and soak them in.