Monday morning stretch

I just finished dropping the kids off at school but today we used public transport in the form of a nice new rail link from near our house to near their school, about $1 each way per kid. They didn't share my sense of adventure with this new effort but perhaps a kernel of something was embedded in their psyche (that's my fallback position when something doesn't work so well). I had hustled over to the train station early in the morning to buy a Kart, basically a prepaid public transportation card, but Monday mornings on school days are the same everywhere and the kids were having a hard time getting backpacks, permission slips and homework all headed in the same direction i.e. out the door. To complicate things, the train station is only a few hundred yards from our apartment but for whatever reason there are about 8 or 9 road crossings between us and the station and we're not yet mentally prepared for crossing without a light.


The good news is that we made it to the train but truthfully only because it was a few minutes late. Jasmine was more alert than I've ever seen her in the morning, checking her watch as we waited for each crosswalk. Sam grumbled, mostly I think because we actually made it, and Zach got up on his tip toes and pointed out using the train map that we were headed in the wrong direction. Son, do we really need everyone in the car to know that out of two trains we picked the wrong one? I don't think so. The fact that we were pulling into a station that seemed to be one stop further away from our destination wasn't lost on me but I guess I had hoped the kids might miss it somehow in the garbled pre-recorded announcements while I figured out next steps. My brain raced. Perhaps this was a special thing here in Izmir where the trains go backwards before they go forwards? Must be either that or a map issue since everyone including the conductor assured me that ultimately we were headed the other direction towards the school. 


Whew, nothing like getting on the wrong train even when it's the right train...unless of course it's getting off at the wrong stop which we also then managed to do at the other end. With Jasmine in a desperate dash for a bathroom while we hailed a taxi to take us that last kilometer I decided to drive the kids to school at least one more day. 
(jasmine writing here) even after all that, i made it to homeroom right as the bell to go to class rang.