Sick Day

The kids are home from school today. We are all having major Immune System Culture Shock. Well, at least I am. I've been ridiculously sick for over a week now. Today, Mia and sam woke up just sick enough to promise to rest all day in bed, but not so sick that they actually did that for more than 5 minutes. So we've been home all day, and we're enjoying some forced writing time now. And when I say enjoying, I mean that I fully expect they'll never want to stay home again.

As for my writing time, the theme is "Sometimes."

1. Sometimes you fall asleep mid-pick, and your mom takes a picture and puts it on her public blog. And you won't even know until you're old enough to google yourself, and by then every potential girlfriend of yours will probably have already seen it. You know what they say: motherhood is hard, but has such sweet rewards.

2. On Sunday, a kind lady from church brought me a 5 lb bag of chocolate chips, which she got at some specialty membership-only store. She must have read between the lines when I told her I was doing "just fine." It was over 20 US dollars. So sometimes you spend insane amounts of money on things you normally only buy on sale, but since you live in a different country that doesn't sell chocolate chips in the grocery stores, you become living proof of the law of scarcity. And now that  I finally tracked down some baking soda (almost $3 a box) at an Indian market this week, we made chocolate chip cookies. This made for 5 extremely happy people. We now have chocolate chip cookie dough in the freezer, and I can face the world again.

You know that Neiman Marcus cookie recipe chain letter that people used to actually mail in the days before forwarded emails?  I'm pretty sure I know how it got started. I'm sure originally it was some expat writing a letter about how much it cost to get all the ingredients to make chocolate chip cookies: $250! But worth every penny. Oh, and send this to everyone you know and tell them to write their name and address on the bottom of the list and soon 46 people will send you absolutely nothing, and 2 people might drive by and egg your house.

3. Sometimes cliches come true. First day of school, and yes, that is a huge zit on Sam's forehead. He's 6.

4. Oh, yeah. Sometimes you have a birthday and turn 6 and your mom doesn't even mention it on her blog. But she still loves you enough to post another picture of you picking your nose on your first day of school. Notice the other kids pretending not to see. Or maybe they're trying not to look at the monster pimple.

5. And finally, sometime while we are here, we'd like to travel. Hopefully as much as possible. In fact, I've been spending most of the day researching tips for traveling in Europe with kids. Here's a great site if you're interested. We have some vacation time in October. Any suggestions? Where would you go if you had 4 days in Europe with 3 kids? Wherever we go, I'll be sure to post pictures of Sam with his finger up his nose in front of something famous.