We just bought a dozen fish at the pet store. Well, we paid for a dozen, but the saleswoman liked Liam so much that she slipped an extra one into the bag, to make a baker’s dozen. (What a baker would do with goldfish is something about which I do not want to think for too long.) We are having a Bad Day, which is hardly surprising as the boy needs a day to recover from a long car ride, and he only had one day in between recovering from the drive down and starting the next one. In fact, it feel somewhat like a sick day in our house, as we are all being very good to ourselves (long car rides are no fun for Mama and Dada, either). So new fish are a treat. Also? A dozen are cheaper than four. Feeder goldfish are our friends, yes indeedy. And the death rate won’t be as noticeable with a whole school like this.

Liam travelled both ways very well in the car, but wow, when he’s had enough, that’s it, he wants out RIGHT NOW. He became very distressed on the way down when we were on a long stretch of highway and he needed to use the bathroom, which triggered a meltdown even though he was wearing a diaper instead of training pants against this very kind of eventuality. When not in the car Liam was very charming to everyone with lots of “hello” and “bye-bye”, and pointing out “people!”. While we were there he discovered the Canada geese who fly back and forth all the time, and thus spent a lot of his walks with his head craned back, waving at them and saying “Bye-bye birds, bye-bye. Go go go!” He also finally saw the moon in the daytime sky, and gave us that “You SEE, I KNEW you were holding out on me with the whole ‘moon at night, sun in the day’ crock you had going!” look when he pointed it out.

Finally following through on an idea I had a while ago, I went out to a craft store in Oakville and found two small needlepoint kits. I’ve almost finished one already. It’s really remarkable how much technique one retains from doing a single small needlepoint project twenty years ago. I got small kits because I didn’t want to overextend myself and ruin my fledgling desire to start needleworking again. It was hard to find a needlepoint kit at all; counted cross stitch appears to be all the rage right now, and while I love the look of finished cross-stitch there is nothing less fun than keeping track of numbers by referring to a chart and counting squares on blank cloth, thank you very much. I wanted these needleworking projects to be fun and relatively mindless, so I made sure the kits I got had pre-printed canvasses instead. I started the first one, a 5 x 5 ” crescent moon for Liam’s room, on Sunday at noon when I brought it home; I now have all of the main design completed (modified, naturally, because the moon had a face and I hate moons with faces) and a third of the background filled in. Go me! It helped that I have discovered that I can do needlepoint in the car without triggering motion sickness, which made the trip home much more enjoyable. (And there is only one person out there who will understand this: ADZO, needlepoint is my bowling.)

My mother can still wield a mean set of shears, as she demonstrated by cutting my hair as she used to do when I was six. She cut three and a half inches off my hair, and I feel so very much better. I’ve been trying to find time/freedom from the small one for about a month now in order to go get it trimmed, because I have been hating how very dead the ends were and how much they tangled. Amazing how much better the loss of four inches of hair makes one feel.

So there you have it: we are home, and relatively sound of mind and body.