Hail to the Bus Driver.

My momma is a school bus driver. She started driving the school bus when she was pregnant with me. This means I was basically raised on a school bus. My mom tried to make me go to day care, but I refused to take naps as a child, and you have to take naps at daycare. I can't believe there was a point in my life that I refused naps. People change. So, with no daycare provider I rode the school bus with my mom almost every day until kindergarten. Then, for a year or so, she was my bus driver. After we moved to Layton I went to year round school, so I was on the bus everyday when I was off track. The best was when my mom would drive to field trips and take me with her. I've been on a lot of field trips. Sometimes she would even make sure she was the driver for my classes field trips. My favorite field trip location is the local planetarium.
When I was five or so we went on a cross country family trip to pick up a brand new school bus from the Blue Bird factory in Atlanta. Its one of the only family vacation memories I have. And the memories are all in a school bus. Like Megan holding her neon hair colored troll out the window in Tennessee and letting the southern wind blow through its synthetic hair. Or when I thought I really had to poop and made my mom pull over on the side of a farm, I pushed and pushed and produced only a chocolate chip sized turd. My dad was mad. I'm sure that road trip was horrendous, because school busses are not comfortable. But I remember it being fun. I think I knew then that most families don't have the bonding experience of hauling ass across the country in a six ton yellow school bus, just the five of us.
Today I went on the school bus with my mom for the first time in years. I filled up the fuel tank, I swept down the aisle, and we went through the bus wash. I don't know how many times that is for me, I've been doing it all my life. But more importantly, my mom has been doing it all my life. All 22 years of it, day in day out, waking up at the butt crack of dawn to get kids safely to school and back home again in order to provide for her family. She hates it now, who wouldn't? But I think the school bus was a nice place to raise a family.