To bus or not to bus...

...that is the question. In my opinion, this is where parenting becomes hard. People can complain about the baby days all they want, but babies are easy for me. They just need to eat, sleep, be changed, have some undivided attention or a stroller ride and they are good. Unless the baby continues to cry it's little head off, you can be relatively sure that you made the right choice. Where you have to make decisions that you have no idea if the outcome of that decision is what benefits your child the most, that to me is what is hard. The latest for me is whether or not Spence should ride the bus to school this year.

I am mainly worried about the 8:20 am drop off. If it is anything like the afterschool pick-up was last year, I don't stand a chance. Having to park a half mile away lugging three kids to the Kindergarten door at the crack of dawn is really not my idea of easy or fun. The bus will pick him up at the corner of the next street over - which is pretty ideal. But there are big kids on the bus. Big kids that can be cruel and tell him naughty words and jokes and the truth about certain people that come to visit at certain times of year ( ie: Christmas). Oh and then there is me being paranoid demented like I am envisioning horrific bus crashes with small children running out in flames. I seriously need help.

My gut tells me that he would like riding on the bus. I think he would feel pretty grown up and cool. That should be the clincher then - let him ride the bus. BUT... I worry that I would feel detached from the school, like I wouldn't be an involved parent. I loved watching him at drop off last year interacting with the other kids. I liked seeing the parents of the other kids to kind of get a sense of who the kids were and what their parents were like. I liked being able to ask or tell his teacher something face to face. I don't know what to do...