I have spent today being alternately euphoric and anxiety ridden and joyful and livid. It sucks to be me.

The euphoric part came in when I realized I was completely done with my Christmas shopping. I hate shopping. And I�m done! What�s not good about that? Nothing, that�s what.

The anxiety-ridden part came before that, when I was trying to finish shopping. Glad that�s over.

Joyful � there were a lot of parts of my day about this. Watching AJ and his friend D. whiz around the ice rink with their miniature hockey sticks, baking gingerbread cookies with AJ, hearing my friend K�s two-and-a-half-year-old daughter sing me �Kookaburra� over the phone and tell me all about her St. Nicolas present (K�s half German and her husband�s Austrian, so they celebrate St. Nicolas day with the putting out of shoes and the receiving of gifts), hearing that K and her husband are adopting another baby.

The livid part happened when I got a phone call from The Girl Next Door�s mother. �Do you mind if I bring AJ home from school?� AJ was supposed to have Spanish class after school today. It�s usually on Mondays, but they moved the last class to Friday this week so the teachers could have next week off. Apparently, though, AJ�s teacher was never told of the change. She sent the kids home instead. The only problem is that no one told the parents. And also, class was still happening. Thank goodness AJ thought to talk to my neighbor. And thank goodness I was home to get the call. After I figured out what happened, I rushed AJ back to school and back to class (after he had a tantrum about having to go to class and not getting to play with The Girl Next Door. But I was livid. The school had screwed up. They�d turned him loose with no supervision. Now, this wasn�t really a dangerous situation. I know most of the parents who pick up their kids after school and most of them live in our neighborhood (the rest of the kids are bussed). Any number of people would have covered for me. AJ wasn�t freaked out or scared and he figured out a good course of action. I�m proud of him. All is well. But I�m furious at his school. This kind of thing should not happen. Because had AJ been a different kind of kid, he could have wandered off or gotten picked up by someone I didn�t know. I am very sympathetic about most types of mistakes schools can make. The things they have to do to get through the day make my head spin. Some kinds of screw ups are inevitable. But errors that leave five-year-olds with no supervision are unacceptable.

And now, if you�ll excuse me, I need to write a letter to the principal.

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