Overdue call from school

We, as parents, get a lot of communication from the school.  By communication, I mean that the school calls generally once every 1-3 weeks to tell us something that simply cannot wait until the children get home with a note. And by that, I mean something bad about our children while they insinuate that we must have gotten our parenting licenses out of a Cracker Jack box.

I mentioned to P that we hadn't gotten a call in a few weeks.  Well, Karma caught up with us and it was a call principal (I was out).  Apparently H had been bored/curious/who knows what during assignments and reached over to the kid next to him and cut his hand open with a pair of school scissors. The principal explained that she didn't think it was provoked or even malicious since H just kept crying and saying, "I didn't think school scissors would be sharp enough to cut skin!"  Imagine H's, A's & Mrs. W's surprise when there was blood gushing everywhere. My response after trying to figure out WTH was he thinking was, "who was it that you cut?  Please tell me it wasn't K.  You have a birthday party with him this weekend and that would make the parental conversation VERY awkward if it's K.  Speaking of, you'd better enjoy that birthday party, because once word gets out of your actions, I'd be very surprised if you are invited to many more parties. " 

Word was already spreading.  C asked as soon as he got home what was going on with H since the lunch monitor (a 6th grader) was telling everyone the story.  Great.   I was able to talk to Mrs. W and fill in some of the gaps in the story.  It seems there was no provocation and the boys had seemed to get along just fine before and H seemed very upset and apologetic about the incident.  Note: I made him write a note to the kid and also he's been banned from video games for an entire week-I think the biggest punishment ever given in our house and he hasn't mentioned them once all week and has been very, very serious about not playing video games all week. However, she felt a little badly for A, because it seems during the evening performance of the Christmas pagent, he'd been attacked onstage during the Grade 1 performance.  When A's dad picked him up to bandage him up, he just asked if it was the same child who attacked him on stage.  Mrs. W said, "no, it was H" and then A's dad and Mrs. W tried to figure out what the provocation was since A and H always seemed to get along fine.  But apparently A's dad was "pretty cool" about the whole situation.

Later that night V had a fever (she's been sick all week) of 104 that just wouldn't go down.  After calling our regular doctor who had no free openings in their after-hours clinic, I tried the urgent care down the road from us.  After showing our OHIP card (provincial insurance) and waiting about 10 minutes we saw a doctor and were checked over and given a strep test.  5 more minutes to find out it was negative and write a prescription for antibiotics (I guess you can't just tell a mom of a child with a temp of 104 to just go home and wait it out) we walked to the pharmacy next door which was not only open, but the charge was only $25 (we have no prescription coverage) and took about 10 minutes to fill. We headed home, gave her a dose and the next day she's fine and normal temperature.  I now have a chest cold but with a Dayquil/Nyquil pack chased down by Buckley's cough syrup (their motto is, "it tastes terrible, but it works" and it's correct on both counts) I'm making it through and had a lovely day of curling, lunch out with an American friend and dinner out with a friend from BC who now lives here.  Tomorrow morning I'm taking my neighbor for an outing at Costco.

Final bit of news, my brother-in-law has now started his own pizzeria!  Ontario's employment department has an entrepreneur program that he's graduated from to get new business owners not only working for themselves, but hopefully employing others in the community!  Paul's been helping him out some evenings which is good for him to get out of the house, though he already says he's eaten more than his fair share of pizza lately.  The pizzeria will be providing pizza as an after curling snack for our upcoming ladies bonspiel (a curling game where people from other clubs come to play) as well as for dinner at our curling club's progressive bonspiel.  The progressive bonspiel sounds like lots of fun.  It's yellow against blue.  You pick a color and play 2 ends.  You then change sheets and play the same color rocks against a different team but keep the score from the first game played on the sheet.  Whichever color has the most points at the end of 8 ends wins the prizes!