Carpool Annoyances

With all the activities that my kids do, I keep my sanity by carpooling. For the most part, I am pretty lucky. For Nico's basketball camp that ran 4 days a week for 3 weeks, my friends didn't even ask me to drive. They just picked up Nico and dropped him off. That was the greatest gift because it fell during Gia's nap (when she was still taking a morning nap). So a huge thank you to J.W, K.J., K.T., L.K., and P.L. During the school year, they let me have Saturdays so I could leave Gia home (and run to Target alone...I loved it!) and they took the week ones. For football, Leo coached Nico and Tommy's coach lived down the street from us (thank you, M.B.). It was great! Leo coached Tommy in basketball and baseball so he took Tommy. A huge thank you to N.W. for always taking Nico to baseball.

I mention all of that because I want you to know that I know the good side of carpooling. The second part of basketball camps were this past week. I had Tommy in camp at the high school first (no carpool), Nico in the afternoon at the junior high (I took one day for this one) and Isabella had tennis at the high school at the same time (no carpool). I have had my share of driving people and carpool lines and OMG!!! The annoyances are beyond Mr. Mom going the wrong way. I would feel bad for these people if I thought it was their first carpool ever but I know one has a bunch of kids and has done carpools before and the other was picking up his junior high son so this couldn't be his first carpool and the other was just common sense.

There are a ton of kids in Tommy's camp and the car pool line stretches pretty far. The first annoying thing is when the first car doesn't pull all the way up so the line has to stretch around the corner. That is a minor annoyance compared with the next one: the mom that gets out of her car to go in and get her son, leaving the rest of us not to be able to move until she gets back. Uggghhhh....this drives me CRAZY! It's not like there are no parking spots. Park the car and then walk in and it doesn't inconvenience anyone. If it was me, I would see the long line of cars behind me and start sweating that I was holding all of them up. I have seen a few of these with this camp and pickup wouldn't be such a headache if this didn't happen. The next example is when I was picking Nico up from camp. There are five boys in the carpool. Again, you wait in line and several boys pile into one car. Sometimes, and this is a given, you have to wait a minute or two for everyone to come out. So it was my turn to pull up and I did up to the farthest point (plenty of room for someone to go around me) and one by one they started piling in. Maybe the jerk behind me saw four kids and assumed I was done and just sitting there but I wasn't. He started honking and throwing up his hands in exasperation because how dare I take longer than three minutes to pick up the kids? I didn't even know he was honking at me because I wasn't doing anything wrong but this seemed to upset him more. Waving and honking. I am so mad that I didn't get out of my car and ask him what he was honking at because I would have loved to have seen his face. Jerk. The last example was when I was picking up Belle. The carpool line goes in a circle and the car in front of me decided to stop and talk to her friend who's car was just rounding the circle part. I swear they were trying to set up a playdate or catch up or whatever but I was stuck behind one car and two others were stuck behind the other and these two women didn't care. They just kept yapping about how busy they have been and how little Susie would looovvveee...blah, blah, blah.

I am so happy that this week is over and so are two of the camps. Not that it matters. Cheerleading has started and shortly after that, football will start so carpooling chaos will begin again.