Change of plans.

My phone rang during Music Together class (yes, we are still going).  I had a feeling it would be Melissa calling to cancel our day together, but let it go until after class.  As we headed out to the van we heard birdsong, amazingly loud.  "Look, Milo," I said, pointing, "the tree is full of starlings." 

"I want to see the tree full of birds!" he insisted as I tried to coax him into the van, and jumped back out and stared straight up —

Straight up over our van.

I realized that the soft intermittent pattering I was hearing all around us was not, in fact, sun-warmed snow.  The van was encrusted in starling sh%t.  Yuck.

Back in the van I called Melissa back.  She sounded horribly sick and insisted that I shouldn’t come over, even to watch her kids for her while she took a nap.  I told her to call if she changed her mind, and hung up.  Hm.  Now what?

So I took the kids to Caribou Coffee (first stopping at a gas station to use a squeegee) and bought them a big chocolate chip muffin to share while I drank a really big black coffee.  I let them leave their coats in the car (they were wearing snow pants) and made sure, pre-emptively, to stuff all the trash and crumbs into the paper muffin-sack, as said trash and crumbs were generated.  They were pretty well-behaved until Milo discovered a carousel of greeting cards for sale (WHY?  WHY does the coffee shop do this to me?)  at which point I hopped up and announced that Oscar could throw away the cups and Milo could throw away the crumbs, and whoosh we were out the door before Milo had a chance to spin the carousel EVEN ONCE.  Ka-ching!

And then I went through the Taco Bell drive-thru to get tacos for lunch.  After we pulled into our garage I got them all coated and mittened before letting them into the yard (poor Mary Jane had to wait in her car seat longer than she wanted to).  In the yard they were greeted with the five inches of fresh snow that fell last night, so they didn’t come in for a good half-hour, after which they spread the lettuce from their tacos (WHY didn’t I order them without lettuce?) all over the kitchen floor and ate the tortillas.

Then I sent them downstairs to watch Marx Brothers movies.

School will start, um, later.  I still have most of the big coffee to finish.