That’s it – summer’s over! Time to tell those kids to hang up their beach towels and hit the books…

…apparently…

This is actually my first year doing The Back to School Shuffle®, and so already we’ve bought the clothes and the crayons and eighteen extra boxes of tissues to send in for the teacher just in case everyone in the school gets a really runny nose at the same time! All that’s left, as far as I can tell, is to shoo my son out the door and take a few photos for Instagram depicting my wife and I drinking mimosas in our pajamas while he begrudgingly climbs onto the bus…

…except that even minus one toddler, we’ve still got two more infants crying for our attention back at home, so rather than turning our home into a Sanctuary of Peaceful Tranquility™ between the hours of 9:30am and 3:30pm, our son going back to school merely reduces the ambient household volume from a 9 or borderline-10 down to maybe a 6 or 6.5.

Which don’t get me wrong, is still nice, but I need it down to no more than a 2 or a 3 to properly enjoy a good mimosa.

That’s just me.

Nevertheless, I can’t sing enough praise not only for my son’s, but pretty much all kindergarten teachers everywhere because on the list of jobs that yours truly could never, ever do, I think that willingly locking yourself in a room filled with two dozen toddlers has got to be way up there near the top of the list, not to mention a contender for one of the most terrifying escape rooms ever created…

Seriously, when I’m around this kid for even just a few hours in the evening, afterwards I find myself having to wash multiple flavors of pudding out of multiple types of fabric, every Lego in existence has been meticulously spread across the floors just waiting for bare feet, and I’m still on edge because at any moment he could spring from his princess-like slumber to announce that horrible messes have magically appeared in his bedroom since I was last there … messes that I’m not going to explain here because they’re just too gross to, oh forget it, they’re usually poop.

AND THAT’S JUST WITH ONE TODDLER – CAN YOU IMAGINE THAT SAME LEVEL OF CRAZY, BUT MULTIPLIED TIMES TWENTY?!?!?!

I’d have to come home every evening and go straight to bed in one of those sensory deprivation tanks to recover, blocking out every input with the sound of absolute nothingness to cleanse myself of all of the running around and the outdoor voices and the throwing of toys at other people even though we’ve already talked about it, like, a million times this week! And yet these holy saints of kindergarten tutelage do the deed five days a week and are somehow able to greet me with a smile and a kind word each and every day when it’s time to pick our little hellion up from school?!

Maybe they get easier to manage once they start talking in actual sentences and eating more than just pudding and goldfish crackers, but I sure couldn’t do it. As far as I’m concerned, teachers deserve all of the apples – not just an apple a day, but truckloads a day, not to mention piles of Christmas knickknacks, and $5 gift cards for Starbucks, too, even though I don’t think you can even buy anything at Starbucks for $5 anymore…

If anybody deserves a welcome back mimosa, our kindergarten teachers do – anything to help take the edge off while they’re cleaning pudding out of the carpet at the end of the school day.