A Misstep in our Mother-Daughter Dance

It's been a whole semester since Kinley and I started this little dance that has us spending each and every school day together.  And, generally, our dance has been surprisingly graceful.  Most of the time we waltz through our day hardly even realizing that our situation is unusual.  As was evident in my last post, though, we have experienced the occasional stumble. Here's another example.

I should have known better.  I should have listened to the little voice in the back of my head whispering, "Don't do it!"  I should have just put her to bed.

But I didn't.  I let her stay up until 9:30 to watch Dancing with the Stars.  And then I paid for it the next day in class.

Kinley and I have a deal that she can sleep in my bed whenever her daddy is out of town.  Since Josh was in San Francisco that night, I had a 9-year-old snuggle partner for the evening.  When she turned on the TV at 8:15, I didn't give it a thought since she never watches network TV in the evenings.  It didn't occur to me that she'd actually find something we'd both want to see.  It's not like we'd been watching the entire season of DWTS.  Heck, we'd never even seen a single episode in its entirety!

So when she stopped surfing on channel 6 and we both got sucked in, I wasn't that worried.  But then we REALLY got sucked in, and she convinced me to let her stay up to see the end of the episode.  I mean, who can resist sparkly dresses and Jennifer Grey's new nose, right?

And so there I was the next day.  Stuck in a classroom with 22 kids staring uncomfortably at my daughter who was weeping hysterically at the injustice of life as a student in her mother's classroom.  She'd had to pay a 20 Boyd Buck fine for forgetting to put her completed homework papers in the basket and another 10 Boyd Buck fine for forgetting to put her name on both papers. 

And that $30 was apparently more than she could handle on only 9 1/2 hours of sleep.  The poor Homework Checkers who'd had to collect her fines were huddling in a corner, apparently afraid that I might blame them for making my daughter fall to pieces before 9:30AM.

Thanks a lot, Jennifer Grey.