Warning: cattiness below.
So I was waiting at the bus stop with DC1 because you have to be I forget how old to wait without a parent. This is usually DH’s job, but he was out of town on a business trip.
While we were waiting for the bus, a truck with a kid pulled up and parked at the corner across from the bus stop.
Then a mini-van/suv thing came and parked right where one would expect the bus to you know, pull up.
That meant that when the bus finally came, it had to stop in the middle of the street and the kids all had to walk into the middle of the street to load the bus. The truck discharged one little girl with her dad. The van discharged two with their mom. (The two little girls and their mom, incidentally, live maybe two houses farther than we do from the bus stop, so maybe 5 houses away from the bus stop total. I don’t know where the truck people live, but the bus does stop every block and a half to two blocks and our cul de sacs aren’t very long, so it can’t be that far.)
Let’s see if I can make a picture of the bus stop area using nothing but keyboard characters.
I feel like this is totally selfish. That bus really should be able to pull safely up to the curb, which would be easier to do if the truck weren’t there and and is impossible with the van there. (When the van isn’t there, the bus does pull up.) The van had to make a U-turn to park where the bus is supposed to go and could have very easily parked across the street (on the side that didn’t make it into my picture), though if they’d done that, it would have only been like 4 house lengths away from their house instead of five. The truck could have parked back a little further to make it easier for the bus to pull up.
But then, maybe I’m the totally selfish one. I make my DC2 walk three house lengths to wait for the bus out in the cold. I mean, sometimes it gets down into the 40s(!), and sometimes the wait is as long as 7 min (if the bus is late). Maybe if I weren’t so selfish, I’d be keeping hir nice and warm in a heated vehicle while we waited for the bus instead of making hir suffer.
I should note that there’s one other family that takes the bus from this stop– their parents are immigrants and connected to the university somehow. Their kids walk– I don’t know how far, but it’s longer than 5 houses. (The dad used to walk with them, but the youngest had a birthday and is now old enough to wait by hirself, so they do. Both kids are super nice to DC2.)
So that’s my catty parenting rant. I guess if it really bothered the bus driver, the bus system would send out a reminder not to block the bus stop while waiting for it. It’s a good thing waiting for the bus is usually DH’s job. (Which is at least partly selfishness on my part, even though it makes more sense logistically and from a who needs to interact with adults standpoint.)