Toot Toot for the Morning Commute

In grad school I had my nearest experience to what many of you gainfully employed professionals call "the morning commute". I lived in Cary and each morning would go to either my campus office, my research site off Lake Wheeler Rd, or a morning class. The drive down Cary Parkway was predictably annoying with older patrons driving slowly in the wrong lane and the usual sense of entitlement that followed Cary drivers in general. By the overpass at US1, I'd either heard a traffic report or could get a visual to determine whether I'd like to sit in thirty minutes of traffic for what would normally be a twelve minute drive on US1 or would rather brave Tryon Rd to sit in thirty minutes of traffic from the buses servicing the three to five schools between Walnut and Gorman.

The morning commute was crucial to my morale in the first couple hours of the day. It's amazing how a fast breezy drive could set me on pace for productivity. Likewise long waits typically threw me off and required 30 minutes of chatting with other students to come down off the fury.

As a work from home mom, I am no longer going places. I mean, I am going places but no places a self-respecting professional would use to pad her resume. My equivalent to the morning commute is the morning diaper change. We live in a two story home with all the bedrooms upstairs. Somedays I get the "traffic report" before heading down for the morning. If Daniel feels pretty dry, we go on down and get some breakfast before changing the diaper and pajamas downstairs. Otherwise, I'll change him in his room where we are more equipped to handle messes.

Some mornings I fail to check the traffic report. Today we ran head-on into a ten car pile up. The top seam of the diaper had busted open, and when I unzipped the footies, I saw little water-lock beads - diaper stuffing - had spilled out and were covering his torso. We headed to the bathroom and I managed to get my confused and smelly little boy and his special seat onto the potty while spilling out these little beads all over the bathroom floor. After sacrificing a clean diaper and a quarter pack of wipes and vacuuming the floor, we did the only thing we could do - headed back upstairs to the tub, aka the diaper crash ER.

We are now watching PBS kids and blogging - I suppose this is my version of chatting with the coworkers while waiting on the coffee to brew. At least we made it to "work" bathed and looking fine.