I set my alarm for 6:10, intending to nudge the teenager out of bed, so he could take the bus to school. (He shares a room with his little brother, who can sleep a little longer, so we come wake him rather than have him set an alarm that is going to wake his brother too. This will not be the case in the new house thank goodness!). My husband and I had a walk-through meeting at our new house at 7 a.m. with the contractors to take stock of what needs to be fixed before we move in a few weeks from now. Our nanny agreed to come at 6:45 or so.

Well, I woke at 6:40. My alarm was ringing…but silently. I’m still not sure what I did there. My husband was up and in the shower but I guess hadn’t noticed that none of the rest of us were moving (including the teenager). I threw on some clothes, woke the kid up and drove over to the new house while my husband did the school run (since the bus was long gone by that point).

The house is coming along nicely. I trudged through with my coffee, flushing toilets to make sure they worked, turning on faucets and light switches and so forth. We may not have an oven when we move in, but we will have a stove so I guess that’s good. In any case, I was in the midst of that when I got a text from another child who asked if I had the felt and foam half-sphere he needed for an earth science project. What? He’d mentioned something on Friday, but I had not understood that this was needed by Monday morning. He thought I had ordered it or something and then when I was gone when he needed to leave there was general panic.

And so I found myself at Michael’s craft store after the construction walk-through. This was quite the place! They did indeed have foam half spheres. And full spheres. I bought a variety, plus felt for creating the various layers of the earth. And potato chips because I was hungry by this point and not inclined to make healthy breakfast choices. Is there any thing this store doesn’t have??? It’s a good thing I don’t go there often.

Anyway, I drove my bag of stuff over to the middle school and left it with the security guard who has a book shelf for just such forgotten things. Indeed, I saw that there were materials for other children in the same class sitting there.

By the time I got home it was 10:30 a.m. I attempted to get started with work, but wound up needing to deal with the forms to lock in the movers for early January. On the plus side, I learned that the Notes function on an iPhone can scan documents and turn them into PDFs. This is very useful knowledge!

Anyway, we’ll see what I get done over the next few hours before I take two of the kids to get dose #2. The people running the clinic (for 5-11 year olds) have promised a special guest at the post-shot waiting area. So…is it going to be Santa? I’m not sure it’s possible to keep kids socially distanced from Santa, and streams of children all piling on the same guy would be ironic at a Covid vaccine clinic. So maybe it won’t be Santa. One of the area sports team mascots? I’ll report back!

Photo: Colorful felt!