Do You Hear What I Hear?

Silence!

Normally this is the time of day when all hell is breaking loose. The kids would have arrived home from school, been complaining that they were STARVING or about HOMEWORK while unpacking their backpacks, their lunch boxes and shoving armloads of paper at me to sort through. Teasing, bickering and whining is what I am used to hearing at this time.

No today though.

Jax and Dex are at their cartooning class (last one today) and Cars is on a playdate. Cars was so excited to take the bus one extra stop today to go to his friend's house. So, I have another sweet hour and a bit of quiet time until I have to pick up Jax and Dex at the school then swing by to get Cars. I guess all I've managed to do is put off the chaos for a couple of hours.

And what I am doing with my time? Blogging and desperately trying to decide what last minute gifts I can get for some young adults on my Christmas list. Usually I buy them American Express Gift Cheques/Checks but today I arrived at my local American Express Travel Office only to find out that they closed up shop in November. And of course these need to be mailed to Canada TODAY to make sure they arrive on time.

So, I came home (oh, after spending 55 minutes in the post office, after a 10 minute wait for a parking spot and then finding out that the very cute Christmas cards that I bought are "bumpy" so each card mailed to Canada and Internationally require an additional $0.20 of postage. That is a freaking lot of money considering that most of my cards are mailed to Canada!) to surf some lame Canadian shopping sites for gift cards for these receipeitns who will be now be receiveing their gifts AFTER Christmas.

Oh, and since I spent soooo long at the post office (and too long in Kohl's as I ran into a very chatty friend), I just now took something out of the freezer for dinner so I am hoping it is defrosted in time to reheat (a meat pie) for dinner. And we have to eat a little early because Dex has his "Third Grade Performance" tonight at the school and since he has a speaking part, I want to arrive a little early to get a front row seat to video him (ok, writing "video him" sounds weird but I had written video tape him then changed it because it is not video tape but digital video on Jax's Flip Video Camera - ok, rambling here).

Ok, so while I hear nothing but sweet silence, all I can hear in my mind is a great big clock counting down.