You know how you stay up late with your husband drinking homemade, blackberry wine and then you wake up at 4:30am and can’t go back to sleep, and four hours later you get on a school bus with 30 first graders for a zoo field trip, and then you walk around for four hours in the rain, and you watch a gorilla regurgitate and re-eat it over and over again, and sometimes the gorilla eats its own boogers, and then you go to lunch and give thanks that you didn’t pack guacamole, and then a bug flies in your mouth, and on the bus ride home your son sleeps the entire way, which means he doesn’t fall asleep until way-to-late-o’clock on a school night?

Yeah me too.

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My son’s teacher pulled me aside this afternoon and said, “I’d like to tell you a story…in private.”

I’m not going to lie. I have been pulled aside by his teachers before.

There was the time in preschool when he pretended he was at a party and the playground mulch was his confetti. And, who can forget the time he followed the principal around like a mime? Not me.

So, today was nothing new. My son’s teacher sent him down the hall to put some things away, then she turned to me and said, “The other day, I looked down to see your boy’s hand in the front pocket of my pants.”

I put my hand on my forehead and began to shake my head from side to side.

She continued, “I told him that he couldn’t do that and I thought that was the end of it.”

My eyes opened wide in disbelief. “It wasn’t the end of it?”

“No, it wasn’t the end of it, because later that day I reached in my pocket for something and pulled out his dirty tissue.”

And then she started cracking up.

Thank you, God, for making my son use a tissue in the first place and thank you even more for a first grade teacher with a sense of humor.

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Yesterday at school, my son exhibited some peculiar behavior when he wouldn’t stop following the principal around. At one point, she came to the second grade classroom where I work to see if I could help, but once my son saw me coming, he turned and went straight to his class.

Later, during a school musical, he asked his teacher if he could sit with the principal and she obliged. As his class was being dismissed, I came out to the hall to see him tailing the poor woman once again. And to top it off, he was doing all of this in silence, like a mime, and we all know how much everybody loves a mime. Oh, wait…

All this? Is not because he has special needs. It is because he’s trying to be funny. When he first started playing the “Me and My Shadow” game, with my boss, I heard her laugh as he was silently standing before her and she asked, “What in the world are you doing?” That was all he needed. One little chuckle and that comic’s bread was slathered with butter.

I was trying to explain this to some parents at soccer practice last night. They both know my son, but neither of them had recognized that he does some strange stuff in an attempt to be funny.

A short time later we looked over to the field where my son was playing goalie during a scrimmage. There were 20 kids waiting for him to kick the ball out to the middle so play could resume. A typical kid would have seen an eager mob, jumping up and down and yelling, “Kick it! Kick the ball!” My son saw a captive audience.

Instead of kicking the ball to his teammates, he slowly walked around to the other side and kicked it into his own goal. The one he was supposed to be protecting.

I turned to the dad I had just been talking to and asked, “See? You see what I mean? He thinks he’s being funny.”

He replied, “Well…he kind of is.”

He might as well have pulled a butter knife out of his pocket.

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Yesterday morning, I tested my level of parenting endurance when the school where I work said they needed me to leave my second grade class for the day and go on my son’s field trip. Thirty kindergartners, a city bus, a downtown transfer and an imminent rainstorm, all at the ripe hour of 8:00 AM.

First, we missed our bus. Then as we stood waiting for the next one to arrive, my son tugged on my arm to tell me he had to poop. Of course.

I did what any self-respecting mother would do and said, “I don’t know what to tell you. You’re going to have to just shove it back up in there.”

On the bus, we met lots of colorful characters. At one point, I mentioned to my son that our new puppy would likely pee in her cage because we would be gone so long, to which he replied, “I bet she will. I can kind of smell her pee right now.” No sweetie, that’s the guy standing next to me.

After the field trip, we waited an eternity for the bus to take us back downtown. We were in a lovely area of Columbus, affectionately referred to as “The Bottoms”. There was lots of trash for the kids to play with and some delightful graffiti for our emerging readers. Something about someone’s mom and a particular body part.

On the bus trip home, I can’t decide if it was more fun to stand for half the ride, or whether it was watching my son’s “buddy” touch the bottom of his shoes and then hold my son’s hand as we walked back to school in the rain. When we finally got back to our car, I just went ahead and had my boy drink some hand-sanitizer.

After arriving home, I spent over an hour on the phone (45 minutes of that on hold) trying to find a baker who can make a Mario cake for my son’s birthday party this weekend. Sorry kid, you’re getting Matchbox cars.

Then, I cleaned pee out of the puppy’s cage. Not from when we were gone for four hours in the morning, but from when I put her in there for 15 minutes so I could do some laundry. Which, makes perfect sense. Oh, and she learned how to climb the steps, so now I have two levels of house on which to chase her.

And, for the icing on the cake? I found my son had etched a self-portrait into our mahogany dining room table.

Some days, there just isn’t enough wine.

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