Bring on high school!

Woo hoo! We were SO excited that 8th grade was over!

Actually, after having to get to school 30 mins earlier than usual, we were more ready to go back to bed than excited 🙂 I would like to thank his school for NOT individually calling out the names of all 684 8th graders being promoted today. I would like to thank them for having a separate awards ceremony two weeks ago. I would also like to thank them for having the event at 9am and for promptly ending it at 10am before it even got remotely too sunny & hot. The pace was well done – biggest drag was the principal’s speech, but even that was short enough. The kids who played music or sang were fabulous. We were back home by 10:45, he changed clothes and then I dropped him off at a friend’s for a bbq for the rest of the day.

And I’m going to congratulate myself for NOT getting into a fight with an extremely rude set of parents. I distracted myself by twittering about them. But I was *this close* to telling this mom just how shocked I was at her selfishness & rude behavior. I think if there were not so many people I knew right behind me – whose kids are going to high school with SB & therefore I’d have to see them again & really did not want to be known as the mom who got into a shouting match – that I would have indeed gotten into her face. But I bit my tongue. HARD. You see she was standing in a large circle of people who were seated in their lawn chairs as the school had advised us to bring over a dozen times. They did not bring chairs. They (as I heard her say constantly) had “gotten there at 8am!” and were not going to budge. They boldly did not give a RIP that they were blocking other family’s views. It was such a defiant display of selfishness that I was truly stunned. This woman was not going to be shamed into giving even an inch of ground. I really couldn’t believe it! More and more parents behind us tried reasoning with her and she (quite literally) stood her ground. There were pleas of “C’mon, we’re all here for the kids, can’t you just kneel down? We’ve got grandparents here and we want to take photos too.” etc etc. Nada. Nothing worked. She just kept up with her “I got here at 8am” line and pointed to other parents who were standing. Trouble is, those parents were on the edge of the sidewalk, not smack in the middle. She didn’t seem to get this subtle point. She was just off to my right and I felt like I was swept up in the middle of this storm and I really was about to tell her how awful a person she was being when a school employee came up and ordered to sit. She even protested THEN, but finally finally squatted down. Her husband had been quiet as a mouse the whole time (shocking!) and just kneeled with her. Naturally, everyone behind us cheered when she sat! She kept mumbling to herself but then the music started and it was all forgotten. What really floored me is that her son was not doing anything special during the ceremony, they had no camera, so WHY be so damn rude?

It was a truly classic case of BITCH, PLEASE! 🙂