Christmas in April

For those of you who don't know, I'm a college student. When my husband and I split up, I found myself having to take care of a two year old son with no child support. At that point I realized that I had two choices. Either I could work in Wal-mart, or a similar job, and continually struggle to make ends meet, or I could go back to school to get a better job. I chose the latter. For the past year and a half I've been a full-time student and I have a little over a year to go.

Still, being a single mom in school is not the easiest thing in the world. Since I'm on subsidized daycare, I only have someone to watch my son when I'm actually in class. A lot of the time it works out because I'll have a couple of hours between classes to get my homework done. Right now though that isn't the case. I'm currently enrolled in 18 credit hours of classes squished into 3 days a week, (one day of which is an evening class that child care is not provided for). Because of that I have the perpetual problem of trying to figure out how to do all of my homework while I'm actually at home with my four year old asking me to play with him.

Then today I discovered the wonder of Christmas. For Christmas this year we visited my family in Florida and my son spent literally hours opening the presents. At the time he just threw one toy after another aside as he went onto the next package. I think he only remembers about 75% of what he got that day, and he's actually only played with about 50% of it. Now, at least temporarily, I've figured out how to get some homework time. Today we found a Scooby-Doo book with over 600 stickers that even I didn't remember seeing before. That was followed by a Batman LeapPad (that we found when looking for the Spiderman one) and an old video tape of children's cartoons from the early seventies (that my mother had given us from her VHS collection). Looking around my son's room today I realized that I could probably get a couple weeks worth of homework done just by dragging out old toys that he hasn't seen or played with for a few months. If I'm lucky it might even get me through mid-terms. After that I'll have to come up with Plan B.