over the summer the braintrust that is the arizona school board decided to re-interpret the definition of time spent in learning. in their infinite wisdom they came to the conclusion that the 5 minutes high school students are given to rush from class to class, which adds up to about a half hour a day, was not actual classroom/learning time and therefore didn't count toward the hours needed to graduate. to fix what they saw as a problem it was decided that the educational day should begin a half hour earlier. which doesn't sound so bad. unless you're a student needing to take a zero hour class...your educational day now begins at 6:30 a.m. (a zero hour class is usually taken by smart kids who want to gather their graduation credit quicker, or mormon kids needing to make up release time spent attending seminary during their school day. we are the latter!) this means maddie and connor have to be on the road shortly after 6:00, and since neither of them drives this translates to me having to schlep them, and usually a friend or two, across town at the crack of dawn. and we all know i am not the bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed kinda gal at that hour.
madeline and connor on the other hand? well, i've got to hand it to them both; they've been troopers. they've complained very little, if at all, about having to be up so early. connor, like me, makes sure he gets every last second of shut-eye possible before stumbling into the shower...but he's still up around 5:30 five days a week. he even gets an extra shout out because technically he doesn't have to be at school that early...his bus to EVIT (a vocational training school) doesn't leave until 7:30, but because he knows it's best to keep mother happy, and in order to keep things simple, he is willing to arrive an hour early and just mill around the library "studying" (sleeping?). madeline of course, being her father's daughter, is up before 5:00 so she can get done all the requisite primping and preening as set forth in FRESHMAN GIRLS' GUIDE TO HIGH SCHOOL. and to each of their credits one or the other of them will remind us all to hurry so we can have a condensed version of family prayer before we head out. i love it, and really do appreciate each of them and their efforts. thank you guys...i love you!
thankfully we have 10 months of summer here in arizona so the mornings have been warm enough and lit well enough that once you get going you almost forget that your up before the chickens. but fall is slowly on the prowl...the mornings are getting cooler, dare i say chill...no, i dare not...they're not chill, who am i kidding?! but they are veeery nearly almost to the point of nippy! and they are definitely getting darker. the air is turning steely grey, and each morning the wedge of orange on the horizon seems a little less bright than the day before. by the time winter is in full swing it will be completely dark and really cold...way beyond chill...and it'll feel like the middle of the night as they head for those early morning classes. they're going to gain a new appreciation for that whole darkest-before-dawn thing. poor babies...i almost feel bad as i dream about crawling back under my toasty warm covers on my return home.
but as the scriptures say...all these things will be for our experience and for our good. and it seems that each generation needs their own up-hill-both-ways-in-the-snow-barefoot-even-on-sunday kind of story so that like their parents and their grand-parents they can one day recall, over and over and over again, the many experiences of their youth...and use them to guilt the next generation into appreciating the comforts of modern life they are fortunate enough to enjoy...
an addendum: rebecca has already left an up-hill-both-ways story of her own in the comments, thus confirming my point. thanks bec. and while she does have more than a valid argument that arizona winters barely compare to the winters of almost anywhere else in the world, i feel the need to remind everyone...it's all relative! - when you live in a state where more than half the year's highs are measured in 3 digits, anything below 50 is going to feel like brass monkey weather. that's all i'm saying...
