Merry Thursday

We're at husband return day minus one. I have given up all pretenses to responsible parenting and am currently revelling in excess and permissiveness. We went to the movies. We had popcorn and french fries for dinner (with a few Swedish berries -- which at least resemble fruit -- as a garnish). Then we went to Chapters to get a birthday present for Eve's friend and I bought Angus the next two books in the series he's reading and Eve the fourth Judy Moody book, instead of giving them their allowance, spending more than their allowance, thus TOTALLY NEGATING the very purpose of having an allowance (excess! permissiveness! total negation!) We came home and I gave them the absurdly fuzzy fleece Land's End pajamas (there was a link to snowflake feet pajamas here) I meant to save for Christmas -- hey, it's cold out and they arrived today, like it was meant to be. I have now been comprehensively, literarily and fuzzily hugged and snuggled.

Today was the Christmas bazaar at our school. People donate stuff which is set out on tables and priced from 50 cents to five dollars, and kids are allowed to shop for their family members. The idealist in me thinks this is a lovely idea. The cynic in me thinks this is an opportunity for a bunch of reasonably well-off people to donate the crap they don't want any more in order for their kids to spend their money on someone else's crap, in the fortunate case that they don't unrecognizingly buy back the crap their own parents donated. It's kind of like musical crap. I wrapped stuff for three hours. I wrapped tea cups and candle holders and stuffed animals and various other weirdly-shaped stuff and one -- only ONE -- nice, flat, square, easy-to-wrap book. I said "can you write two gift tags?", sometimes three or four times before it sank in that I wanted them to -- hey! -- write two gift tags! I managed to mostly keep my good humour. My good humour nearly deserted me when I got to the movie theatre with the kids, went to pull out my wallet and realized that instead of leaving the tape dispenser I had carried around all afternoon at home I had left my wallet and was now trying to pay for the movie with the tape dispenser. Happily, we don't live too far from the movie theatre. And my kids are used to me doing weird crap with my wallet -- they looked at the tape dispenser, looked at me, looked at each other and walked back to the van and got in, kindly saving their eye rolls for after I got in and they were behind me. And it's a P.D. day tomorrow. When we will all wear our pajamas and read books all day. I may or may not serve actual food. I'll let you know. p.s. Angus pajamas had dinosaurs on them, in case you think I gave him snowflake footies.