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Hill Country Living

By Coulter Fussell

It is finally here. Summer has begun. After several weeks of end-of-the-school-year madness, this first day of summer feels like when you get off a roller coaster ride at the fair not sure whether or not that was fun or torturous and it takes you a minute to pull it together enough find the closest sno-cone stand.

All of us parents know what the month of May is like. I have been up to that school for events so many times in the past few weeks that I feel I should get my own report card. And I better receive all A’s. The subject of Parking At DES is my best, for which I am very proud, because I also think it’s the hardest subject. 

Some of y’all parents, though, deserve a non-passing grade in Parking At DES and y’all know who you are. Granted, we don’t have much to work with or much instruction, but there comes a point at which you need to be a self motivated learner. Can you not sort of generally imagine where there the parking spots might be if we had them? 

Do you have to turn around in the middle of carpool line or park at an event all willy-nilly, blocking six other cars? I think our children need to give us all a refresher course in geometry so we can learn some implied spacial awareness.

The parental school subject I would make my lowest grade in is Random Fees. I am always paying random fees at the last minute or, honestly, many minutes too late, if at all. I can scrawl off a four dollar check in the carpool line like a boss, even though I’m writing it on top of my turning steering wheel which will surely honk in the process, leaving the check looking like it was written by a left handed chicken. 

In Random Fees class, I’m the parental equivalent of the student who’s mom has to run her homework up to school because she left it at home. And then my kid is scared all day they’re going to have to eat the brown bag lunch on the field trip because I forgot to give them two dollars.

But, by far, my favorite parental school subject is “Going To Stuff.” I love going to all the programs. Yes, it’s hot as Hades in the gym and, yes there is a vast ocean of space/ stagnant air/low-sound zone between where we sit and the stage, and yes the railing in front of the bleachers is always somehow directly at my personal eye level making every kid on stage look to have a horizontal pole-head. But it’s worth it when you’re kid is dressed in borrowed suspenders in the school play and doing a German accent or when the school graduation speaker shares nuggets of life knowledge like,” If you to want to soar like an eagle then you can’t hang with the chickens.”

I’d like to send a big congratulations to my oldest kid, Amos, who just eased on out of DES yesterday for the final time. You and all your classmates looked so big in that gym and I realized at that moment it was truly time for y’all to go. Y’all had literally sized out of elementary school. You all were really cute laughing so hard at your baby pictures in the slide-show, not aware yet that the pictures you’ll laugh at most when you’re all seniors are the ones of you now.

Lastly, thank you, teachers! May all the frozen icy drinks of the summer stay frozen longer for you!

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