After school on Monday, Annabel was coming home with us for a lunch date. It’s nice, y’know? You’re three years old. You need a little more mealtime stimulation than moms who only get 2 hours of free time 3 days a week can provide. So Annabel was going to ride with us, and Alice would meet us anon with Phoebe the younger. Normally I drive the Passat, which has an easily-accessible center seatbelt in the back seat. Zoe and Lucy ride in their car seats and Annabel sits in the middle with a regular seatbelt on. (No officer, we’ve never done this before.) However, today I was driving the Outback (yes, these were our two cars back when we were DINKs too so just shut up) whose center seatbelt is a little more, shall we say, subtle. I would have had to remove the two car seats and stick my hand into god-knows-what in the back seat crack to find it (not knowing if it was in there at all). Annabel would no doubt obediently hang around right by the car while I performed these maneuvers, but the second Zoe & Lucy realized my focus was elsewhere they would have taken off for the Mad Hatter faster than you can say “Gimme my DIY Cupcake.”
So I called Alice and told her it wasn’t going to work for us to drive Annabel. That we’d wait at school until she could get there and then we’d convoy the whole mile back to our house.
Isn’t that what you would do?
