It’s okay Mom, I’m in the back row

Christmas concert last night. (Well, "winter concert", actually.) A normal mom would have figured out a week ahead of time what each child was wearing, whether those clothes were clean, whether there were tights to match the dress, and whether the right shoe could be found that matched the appropriate left shoe. But not me – oh no, not me. It’s at those moments that I despair of EVER being a normal mom.

The concert starts at 7:00, we have to leave the house by 6:15, and I get home from work around 5:30. With no clue what my kids will wear to the concert. Given the fact that nobody in our house ever dresses up these days, anything that resembles a dressy outfit is either buried at the bottom of a Rubbermaid box somewhere, or hanging at the back of the closet of the child who outgrew that particular outfit two years ago.

The oldest two kids fend for themselves (and Nikki wasn’t going to the concert anyway, since she’s outgrown it), so I didn’t pay much attention to the fact that Julie was wearing jeans (at least they were black – a little more dressy, right?) and orange plaid runners to the concert. But Maddie – what would Maddie wear? In a rare moment of forethought earlier in the week, I’d at least bought a new pair of black tights, thinking that I’d find a dress somewhere in said Rubbermaid or closets. But um… wouldn’t you know it – this is the week Julie finally got around to thoroughly cleaning her room (because we had a home inspection for an upcoming exchange student visit) and emptied the closet of all the dresses she’d never wanted to wear in the first place – and there was no dress to be found. Except the sparkly silver one that Maddie refused to wear because it had long sleeves AND it itched. The best I could do was the too-short black dress that Maddie had worn as play clothes a few days before that was now at the bottom of her laundry bin (and that I believe she wore to last year's concert). In my desperation, it seemed clean enough, so we slapped it on and accessorized with one of my beaded necklaces. And shoes – well, we managed to scramble through the right Rubbermaid and found fancy black shoes that fit. Unfortunately, the tights turned out to be about a foot too long, so she had to walk around on huge lumps of folded tights in her shoes.

It wasn’t until we got to the school and I was helping with her shoes that I realized just how dirty the little black dress was. Was that snot all over her sleeves? Play doh? Sigh.

“That’s okay Mom – I’m in the back row anyway. Nobody will see it.”

And so we survived another Christmas concert. And my children have one more story to share with their therapists.