When I picked the girls up from school, we had about an hour to get some dinner before the arts expo. Normally, that's a piece-of-cake task, but as I got out of my car, my ex-sister-in-law called me, so I was trying to hold a conversation while also getting the girls rounded-up. Even then, it should have been no big deal, but each of the girls had their own little issues going on.
Darby should have been done with piano lessons by this time, but she was nowhere to be found, though her school bag was laying out in plain sight, wide open (i.e. not zipped, contrary to my frequent reminders). This wouldn't have been a big deal, but I had sent her message not so long ago that I was on the way there. Shelby was in the middle of being verbally disciplined for something she had done on the playground... she had tied the sweatshirt I sent to school with her this morning onto the top rung of the monkey bars and had been taking turns with her classmates swinging from it.
So there I was
This was not a pretty or desirable situation to be in. Of course, it didn't help my frustration level that just before I left work (i.e. not enough time to fix it), my computer crashed hard. Some kind of serious hardware failure. I dread the morning already.
It took a number of minutes to get all those dangling situations resolved. But once we got to the car, both children got some verbal harshness from me. As it turns out, Darby went to piano lessons without her music because she was being too lazy to walk back downstairs to her wide-open school back to get it. Oh, AND she didn't relay to the piano teacher an important reminder message I sent to her phone earlier in the day. I just made Shelby pay for the sweatshirt. I was so appalled by the damage (one arm stretched to oblivion, the other ripping from the torso, and the hood nearly torn off), that I told her she just bought it. I made her give me ten bucks out of her wallet on the spot, then I gave her the sweatshirt back and said, "now that you own it, do what you want with it, not that it isn't damaged beyond practical usability." Man, was I peeved. But it wasn't like I could just drive home and put them to bed early. We still had to get dinner and get back to the school for the arts expo. In less than an hour at that point.
The arts expo was actually rather pleasant, at least in contrast to the rest of the day. I actually got to sit, and then watched Darby and Shelby sing in the choir, and Darby play several songs on the recorder with her class. Then we checked out all the artwork on display, including the girls' six pieces (3 each... and I don't recall seeing anyone else with so much art up on the wall).
After the expo, as I was trading-off the girls with their mother, Darby noticed several crickets on the loose in her mother's car. Her mother had picked-up a bag of crickets (presumably for either her tarantula or the girls' pet salamanders), but there was a hole in the bag so several of them had gotten out. Such a thing is not so much a bother for Darby, who was trying to pick them up, but Shelby is not much of a bug person, so she about flipped out and said something to the effect of "oh no, there's a cricket full of cars." That got a good laugh out of me, which made me nearly forget that there was so much strife a couple hours earlier. Leave it to Shelby to be the quirky comic relief.
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