Happy Friday!

Welp, another week is drawing to a close. Nothing major to report. No one's sick, or hurt or had their undies flushed down the toilet. As an added bonus, undies were worn to school every day this week! It is with a heavy heart that I say that there have been weeks in the past when I couldn't say that. As you can imagine when a certain young one of ours gets out of the shower these days the questions are asked," Are you out of the shower?" "Yes!" "Do you have jammies on?" "yes!" "Do you have undies on?" big sad sigh before we hear the response, "Yes."  I would say all in all it's been a calm week! Let's talk about Dr Seuss for a minute, or ten. Ok, as we all know it was his birthday a couple weeks ago. Wait, what's that you say, you didn't know that?! Your young one's school didn't send home a paper telling you that they were going to celebrate him for an entire week so your kids needed to dress up or do something crazy with their hair, clothes, socks or skin everyday for the upcoming week?! Odd! Ours did. As soon as I read the paper I thought to myself, "Self, do we really have to do all this? Maybe they didn't tell the students what was happening. Heaven knows that our young ones don't like to feel stupid and all the things on the paper have potential to make one feel very stupid. Maybe just maybe we won't have to do it." Wrong! It's like our kids can read my mind. As soon as I thought those thoughts K looked at me with a huge smile on his face and told me day by day what they were supposed to be doing to celebrate Dr Seuss. Some of you may be thinking that I'm truly a Grinch for not wanting to participate in a week long celebration. In my defense, I am so far from crafty that it's truly painful. The thought of coming up with things that will celebrate Dr Seuss and not have our off spring feel stupid is a real challenge and feels me with instant anxiety. The one I was most dreading was Friday. The second graders were supposed to dress up like a character from a book and have a parade around the school. I think the color actually drained from my face. M came spinning over and said,"On Friday I'm suppose to dress up like a character from a book. Hannah was Thing One before. I want to be Thing One or Two. They look the same you know." I told her thank you that I did know that. I asked what Hannah had worn. She said a red shirt with Thing 1 written on it and red pants. I told her that we didn't have a blue wig for the hair. She said,"Oh that's ok, Hannah didn't have blue hair either. She just had brown." Hannah must be the Thing 1 expert! I told M that I have a red shirt, but it has writing on the front. So we can turn it inside out and she could use that. She happily danced away and I sighed a big sigh of relief that we already knew what she was going to dress up as the following Friday. Fast forward to the next Friday. It's 5:55 in the morning and the phone rings. You would think that my first thought was that someone had died. Nope! I knew it was the school. How did I know and why were they calling so early? The weather! It had rained ice all night so I knew that they were going to tell us that school was either delayed for two hours or it was called off all together. It was just delayed. So, I went back to bed! The icy rain continued to fall, so at 7:00 the phone rang again. This time school was being cancelled. Hallelujah! That meant that we didn't have to send M to school as Thing 1! No such luck! On Monday they told us that due to school being cancelled, the activities for Friday had been moved to the next Friday. Big time bummer! Friday comes, I get food for the young ones. I ask them to go get dressed. I tell M I'll be up in a minute to get her the red shirt that she's going to wear to be Thing 1. She spins around and says,"Actually mommy, I decided that I want to be Sally." Sally is from The Cat in The Hat. I look at her and say,"Oh I'm sorry. Sally wears a black jumper, which you don't have. A white shirt with a ruffle, which you don't have and a big red bow in her hair, which you don't have." Now I know that some of you reading this would have no problem making that outfit out of whatever you had around your house. I am not like that. I would have had to go to Goodwill everyday of the previous week to try and find the needed items of clothing. I digress. She gave me the little attitude cough of annoyance and then said,"but I want to be Sally." I said once again,"Sorry Sweets, you don't have the stuff you need to be Sally. I can't magically make the outfit appear. You can't tell me the morning of that you want to be Sally when we've been planning on you being Thing 1 for two weeks. I can go get the red shirt and you can be Thing 1, or we could try to do Cindy Lou Who." Imagine M dorking around. What I mean by that is for the next 5-10 minutes, she rolled around on the floor playing with her hair, picking at the carpet or trying to pick the baby up and roll around with him. I asked her probably close to a million times to please go get dressed. She finally sighed a mighty sigh and said"Fine, I'll be Thing 1" I told her I would come get the shirt so she could turn it inside out. She turned around slowly and asked. "Wait! Will you be able to tell that it's turned inside out?" I said yes and she said whilst doing the attitude cough,"Well, I guess I'll just be Sally." Up to this point I had stayed calm even though she had been dorking around for close to a half an hour. I could feel my blood pressure rising as I not so calmly said,"Just go get dressed in normal clothes. I will send a note to your teacher telling her that you didn't want to wear an outfit." She started to whine and said, "But I HAVE to dress up!" I told her that her choices were Thing 1 or Cindy Lou Who. She stomped upstairs saying, "Fine! I'll be Cindy Lou Who." At this point we have 9 minutes before we are supposed to be leaving to take them to school. It takes me 9 minutes to do a pony tail. I am no hair doing guru. Now she wanted me to figure out  Cindy Lou Who hair in 9 minutes? Right! Yeah, that didn't happen. It took me quite a bit longer than 9 minutes.

  Here's the most annoying part. When she got in the car after school she said,"Guess what mommy? I didn't have to dress up as a Dr Seuss Character. It just had to be someone from a book." My mouth fell open and all I could do was shake my head. I may or may not have been cursing the school in my mind. She said there was a girl in her class dressed as a ballerina. Another boy was a football player. So, she could have worn normal clothes with a pony tail and said,"I'm Sara from the book, Best Friends." SO ANNOYING!!! There's so much wrong with the world these days and one of them is celebrating Dr Seuss for an entire week and at the end of said week dressing up as a character from any book!