Pickle-ade

There's a wonderful cookware/kitchen gadget store called the Glebe Emporium over on Bank Street, about a 20-minute walk from my office. It's a great place for browsing or picking up gifts. It's the best place to find paté knives, wine glasses, giant stock pots, banana protectors for your lunchbox, or potato peelers with handles shaped like a tiny stack of spuds. Scattered throughout the store are little blackboards with quotations chalked on them. My favourite reads: "If life hands you lemons, make lemonade. But if life hands you pickles, you might as well give up, because pickle-ade is really disgusting."

Well, last night, life handed me a small bouquet of pickles. Nothing really earth-shattering or serious, no grave diagnoses or untimely deaths, but just enough to make a day where I came out of 8 hours of advanced Excel training (pivot tables, anyone? Vlookup? What??) with a dull throbbing headache just that much worse.

• I was starved when I got home. I told the girls we would have to have supper before we went to do errands, including a trip to Dollarama which was a reward to Rachel for good behaviour. I took a pan of PC chicken sausage rolls (Rae's new obsession) out of the oven and she came over to sniff at them and she leaned too close and burned her chin on the cookie tray. Ice was needed.
  

• Stopping to have supper first got us to the dollar store at 6:17. It closes at 6:00. Many, many tears from Rachel. I am a bad mommy. I was left in no uncertainty at all about this fact. This didn't help the headache.
  

• We headed to the grocery store to pick up a few things. I promised the girls a treat at the checkout to make up for not getting to the dollar store. While chasing Leah around the various checkouts as she searched for white Tic Tacs, I wasn't watching the screen to see all the items rung up like I usually do. The beeping of the scanner sounded very loud and echoey in my sore head. I glanced at the running total: $121.89. "Stop!" I half-yelled at the checkout girl, "there's no way I've spent over a hundred dollars. Something's wrong." The people in line behind me looked mildly interested at this until it became clear that I expected the checkout girl (and she was only about 16 or so) to find the mistake and correct it, then there was a low muttering and some eye rolls. I cared not. Turns out she had punched in the wrong code. Instead of ringing up 2 croissants from the bakery, she had rung up two cases of rice milk at $33.99 a case.
  

• After putting the groceries in the trunk and starting the car, I had to get back out of the car to help Rachel with her seat belt. While trying to unlock the driver's door to in order to get out, I accidentally set off the car alarm. It took me nearly a minute to remember how to shut it off and the loud honking was making us all crazy.

• On the way home, Leah and I were talking about her new split class, and had the following conversation:

• Me: I don't know how the teacher can teach you everything she would have taught you if she was teaching you 100% of the time, now that she has to spend half the time teaching the Grade Ones in your class.

• Leah: I don't know. You could ask her, or the principal. We have a man principal now.

• Me: Yeah, I know, I saw him at the back-to-school barbecue. He looks about 12 years old.
  

• Leah: 12? No he doesn't.
  

• Me: No, I didn't really mean that. It's just weird for Mommy that all the people that I used to look up to as being older and wiser are now younger than I am: doctors, teachers, police. Even your principal is younger than I am.
  

• Leah: Yeah, waaaaaaaaaay younger.
  

• Me: Ouch. Thanks.

• Rachel slipped on the front porch stairs when we got in and added a skinned knee to the burned chin.
  

• I realized I had forgotten to buy paper towels and Advil, and I'm out of both.

I gave up. After I got the kids in bed, I opened a beer and took it to bed with me. No pickle-ade for me.