Are Those Your Pajamas? Or Are You Just Glad to See Me?

My cell phone rang at 9:20 on a Tuesday morning. It was a 332 number. Phone numbers from my little town outside Omaha start with 332. That meant either something was wrong with my 15-year-old or my 8-year-old.
Crap.
In my haste to find out who had hit whom, who had said what, or who had thrown up where, I dropped my cell, rendering it inoperable. "I broke my phone!" I cried. Luckily, being at work, there were lots of cooler heads to help me.
"Turn it off and turn it back on," Susanne said.
Seriously, it hadn't occurred to me. In my panic I went right into "I'm screwed" mode.
When the phone rebooted, I had a message. A child's voice, not really recognizable as one of my own, crying and whimpering, "If it says leave a message does that mean she's not there?" Then some school office type noise. Then nothing.
I called the elementary school. Yes, my 8-year-old had called me. They put him on the phone.
Hysterics isn't even a good enough word to describe what he was going through. Sobbing, wailing, all I was able to make out from his rant was: I'm at school in my pajamas.
Now, I personally helped him get his track pants, shoes and socks on this morning. So I knew he wasn't at school in his pajamas.
"Put an adult on the phone, honey," I said.
The nice school lady said my diva -- I mean son -- had approached his teacher not long after school started, upset because he said he was still in his pajamas.
He was wearing a gray sweatshirt type shirt with a Huskers logo on it.
It doesn't look like you are in your pajamas to me, she said.
But he must of persisted, because at recess she let him go to the office to call me.
Truth is, that shirt is not a pajama shirt. But he wears it for pajamas. AND he had worn it to bed the night before. We don't put a clean shirt on him in the a.m. until he finishes breakfast, because he's a spiller. A clean shirt before breakfast just means another clean shirt after breakfast.
That morning, in our haste to get to school on time, get the dog to the vet (more on this in another post) and get mom to the office on time, so she can switch her brain from Mom Mode to Work Mode, thus saving her sanity for yet another day, I neglected to notice that he hadn't changed his shirt yet.
"Why didn't you say something to me," I asked later.
"I couldn't see it," he said.
"What do you mean you couldn't see it," I asked. "You were wearing it."
"Mom," he said, with all the exasperation an 8-year-old can feel for an obviously dumb adult who let him go to school in his pajamas, "I was wearing my coat."
Well, that explains it. He's like some kind of aborigine. If I can't see the shirt, the shirt doesn't exist. Wonder if he thinks my camera steals his soul, too.
Later, on the phone with dad who is working out of town, I heard him say, "This was the worst day of my life."
Jeez -- my kids are spoiled. The worst day of his life? Because he wore the shirt he slept in to school? Wait until college, kid. Somedays, you'll be lucky if you have clean underwear and socks during the same week.
Where do my children get this penchant for hyberbole? The worst day ever. The worst Christmas ever. But I know where they get it.
After the phone call from the school, I put my head down on my desk and said, "I 'm the worst mom ever."