What have we done?

I'm home at 2:30 on a school day. The reason? There was a forecast for 1 inch of precipitation starting sometime in the afternoon. Not a flake or ice-ball in the sky, mind you, simply a mere prediction of some small amount of wintry mix starting "sometime" between the hours of 1 o'clock and 5 o'clock. Not much of a sure thing.

And early dismissals are not much of a celebrated event at my school. At most schools, you're dismissed at a certain time, and everyone leaves together, nice and easy, no big deal. At a private school where kids come from more than ten different area districts, kids must leave whenever their bus arrives. That means teachers have to try and hold things together as their students start sporadically dropping like flies and the day gets increasingly meaningless as time passes. This started at 10:45 AM.

Remember the days when early dismissals were saved for the instances when stuff was actually coming out of the sky? (And it's so much more fun that way! Running out of school into a blizzard and shivering with excitement as you get on the bus!) Is it just me, or are we growing wimpier and wimpier with each winter season? (Wimpier and wimpier, as the winters--at least in PA--seem to be getting milder and milder.)

In a recent conversation with a certain CEO of a certain crayon-making company, the topic turned toward self-centered kids and over-protective parents. When asked why this is the trend nowadays, he emphatically insisted it all started in the mid-80's, when a little yellow diamond started to be hung in car windows. Three words changed it all, he said. Baby on board.

That was the time, in his mind, when parents decided their children needed to be kept in a safe, protective bubble where nothing would hurt them. Drive however you want, but if my baby's in this car, please keep your distance. From then on out, kids weren't allowed to leave the house until they were 13, they couldn't explore, they couldn't play on their own, and everything was safely kid-proofed.

Now I'm thinking that mindset progressed further and further until today, when twenty years later, kids aren't allowed to ride the bus if the weatherman has some hunch that some amount of some form of some precipitation will fall out of the sky somewhere around the time of some of their trip home.

Just sayin.