It’s been a little insane this weekend. Last night J had a friend over and M was at a sleepover. This morning M had a soccer game, and I knew it would be unbelievably cold, so I scheduled a make-up gymnastics class for J, so we had a good excuse to miss soccer. Between the sleepovers and all that athletic activity, both girls took naps this afternoon (although M claims she never fell asleep. In the 2 hours that she lay quietly on a a bed in a darkened room. But whatever). Anyway, the nap was a good thing, because tonight we went out to dinner with some friends. Only grown-ups. Excellent. We had a mini-babysitter crisis, which meant that I’d recruited a babysitter to take care of 4 kids at our house. Plus, we had to fit in a shopping trip after the nappage, because M’s got a birthday party, and I felt a sudden, pressing need for snow boots. Never mind that it was fruitless, with the shelves as picked over as in that Walgreens Halloween commercial (which I could not find on the internet, but it reminded me so much of Target that I laughed out loud).
So I barely managed to get into the door before 6 pm, when both the babysitter and the pizza were scheduled to arrive. Cute W was in the shower, and I had aspirations to apply mascara, so I was upstairs when a daughter summoned me to the front door to see the pizza guy. They’d answered the door, then abandoned it, so he stood shivering on our front step, door swung wide open, while the girls stared slack-jawed at some figure skating competition on tv. Pizza Guy warned me that I had a hazardous, slippery walkway and accepted some rumpled singles, and meanwhile the babysitter, who was a new one, was driving up. As I ferried the pizzas to the dining table, I told the girls that the babysitter had arrived and J ran to the (still open) door. I thought that her attention span could hold out for the next 90 seconds, but I was wrong. Instead she lost interest and wandered away, and I realized that once again I had someone shivering uncertainly at my front door, which was wide open to the cold. So I made my apologies while the babysitter literally stumbled in. And as I was loudly reminding my children that we have to pay money to heat the house, I looked back and J was standing at the wide-open backdoor. “Close the door!” I yelled, and she promptly slammed the door in the faces of our friends who were delivering the Extraneous Children in Need of a Babysitter. So I told her that she could open the door again, and she hastily opened the door, informed them that they were allowed to come in, and shut it quickly.
Phew.
But after all that we had a very fun night out with our friends at the Water’s Edge Lighthouse. And yes, I struck out on the snow boots entirely. So tomorrow, if you see some overtired kids playing in the snow in their rainboots, you’ll know that you’re at our house.
Oh, and did I mention that I helped provide helpful hints in case of a Zombie Apocalypse at All Over Albany? You’re welcome.
