Our day

When we began homeschooling (we're into our 7th year), we started a tradition of taking a day off to go Christmas shopping. It's our one and only PD day for the year (ya...that's right, their teacher is a mean old tyrant that only allows one PD day per year). The children look forward to it, as do Larry and I.

We decided today would be the day. Everyone was up early, had breakfast, dressed, washed dishes and ready to go by 8:00. This meant we were in town by 8:30. Walmart was the only store open at that time so we began our shopping there. From there we moved on to a few other stores....Michaels, Zellers and a couple that are unique to this area.

After we'd shopped for awhile, we decided it was time for lunch. This too is part of our 'tradition' and after a bit of a discussion on where we should go, we headed to the restaurant at Zellers.

After lunch, Larry had to head off to work. The kids and I had one more store to hit before we headed home.

It was a great day and we didn't have any of the usual questions we've been accustomed to on our one PD day (questions like, "What, no school today?" etc.). I think the reason being schools here seem to have many PD days (similar to Ontario before Mike Harris did away with them). Added into the mix, not all schools get the same day off....so people are probably used of seeing children out and about during school hours. We were ready just in case though (one year on our PD day, we were in line at Walmart....you know where there are lines all over the place. This is when we were still in Ontario. Anyway, just as the cashier started ringing ours in, the computer systems went down. There we were, along with all the other lines and cashiers just standing there....wondering what we were going to do. People were starting to get impatient, looking around and rolling their eyes. All of a sudden our cashier spotted our children and asked, "What....no school today?" When we said we homeschooled, that caused a lot of people to look....and the questions started coming at us from all sides....literally....people standing in line to the left and the one to the right, people in the line behind us and all the cashiers around us....All of a sudden we were centre stage having to explain the whole homeschooling thing. Eeekk...We did pretty good and were able to answer all the questions....but I sure was glad when the computers came back on-line.)

We all finished our Christmas shopping too, so that is a bonus. We don't go all out for presents....they each get $20.00 to spend and that has to buy presents for 4 people. (Jake even had $5.00 left out of his $20.00). It was interesting trying to get presents without the others seeing what we were buying for them. This too has become part of the game though and adds to the whole day. It was much easier when they were younger to hide what we were doing, but now not so much so. Tyler has been accusing us of "whispering" all day. Silly boy. ;0)

Oh well....back to the grind tomorrow!