So… we settled in the room for a bit. Since i had spent 2 days wandering the city and not managing to hit either a Tim Hortons OR a Starbucks (even though I waited for my parents outside Tim’s for 15 mins!) G and I decided to make coffee while we got everything in order. I realized, pretty quickly, that I had forgotten GirlChild’s bathing suit at home… along with the toothbrushes and toothpaste and hairbrushes… and my contact things… so I turned on the tv for the kids, found a kid show, and trundled off into the absolutely terrifyingly COLD weather to pick up the remaining stuff from my house.

 

I grabbed everything I thought I could possibly need and might have forgotten… and ran back to the hotel. Meanwhile, apparently, my 5 year old thought that she NEEDED almost minutely status reports from G (call my mother, my brother did X, where is my mother, is she at the house, did she get to the house, is she on her way back, is she here yet…) which was driving G nuts (because, yes, GirlChild DOES apparently need to know what is going on every minute of the day).

 

So when I got back to the hotel I realized that if I had remembered to bring an extension cord I could have plugged my car in (which, yes, when it is -30 to -45C during the night, you NEED to do if you want your car to start in the morning… for example of what will happen if you don’t, note the FROZEN battery that RGG suffered from for the weekend)… but I didn’t want to go all the way home again, waste more gas, and drag my 50′ extension cord to the hotel for the night… and I didn’t have a short convienient cord in my trunk (where, you think, I should have these types of things)… so I parked as close to one of the entrances as possible with the intention of coming out a few times during the evening and night to start the car and let it run so that it wouldn’t freeze up.

 

Seriously. We do these things. Ask anyone else crazy enough to exist in this province… and I have to ask myself (at least once a year, if not more often)… WHY do I still live here???

 

Anyway… I wandered back to the hotel room, suited up the kids and myself, checked my phone to see if RGG had texted any update on his frozen battery situation, and then the 4 of us wandered off to one of the pools to swim. BoyChild had a great time swimming around in the shallow pool, jumping around and splashing and diving and ducking under the water. GirlChild clung and hovered close to me as I sat in the hot tub (which was HOT) and as I sat beside the cool shallow pool. She’s not as adventerous as her big bro is… she’s always been cautious and fearful of new things (except sushi) and since she doesn’t know, yet, how to swim she is fearful of being in the pools without at least one adult beside her. And… I have found that I have outgrown my love of swimming that I used to have (I was practically a mermaid from age 10-18 during the summer seasons (which is as painfully SHORT as our “winters” are PAINFULLY cold and long)) and have no desire to paddle around in the cold water…

 

We swam around and sat in the hot tub while G knit on th scarf pattern I gave her for Yule (something that looked complicated in a stitch called “heringbone” which involved slipping stitches and double knitting or purling…. the pattern is call “my so called scarf”) with the fancy hand spun wool (made out of real SHEEP). We splished and splashed, but at 5pm I decided that we had had enough, and that we needed to get back to the hotel room and settle down a bit before we thought about eating.

 

Now… here is what the plan was: check with RGG to see if he and his daughters would make it into the city, if they were planning on joining us for supper and a movie (and potentially staying in the hotel with us for the evening) and then determining where we would order pizza from and order things for delivery. And the plan seemed to be going well… 

 

RGG texted me as we came back to the room, letting us know that his father had come out to his town and they had managed to get his absolutely frozen car started, and that he thought that he and his girls would, in fact, be able to make it to the Yule celebration with us in about an hour or so. I texted back to see if pizza was acceptable (which is a silly silly thing, since RGG seems to like pizza, worked in pizza places, and is actually considering openning up his own pizzaria in his small town (due, I think, in part with the frustration of not having anything out there)) and if so what kinds his girls liked.  And that was that… 

 

I decided that I would wait for him to message me that he was in the city, so as not to have to have everyone (GirlChild, BoyChild, and G) eat before our guests arrived… or to not have the pizza arrive before RGG and his girls… and to minimize waiting for everyone. So I told him to text me when he was at the edge of the city, so that I coudl phone and order while he was at his parents’ unloading things and getting ready, which should give the pizza enough time to be delivered… 

 

Meanwhile we openned presents from G and her parents… as G had already gotten her gift from me (wool and the pattern, keep up, eh?). The kids were occupied with their new things, and G and I spent some quality time knitting (G on the scarf, which I think is turning out beautifully, and I am working on socks for GirlChild) and we spent the time waiting for RGG to text saying they had made it in. There were christmas specials on tv, and the kids were relatively quiet and occupied.

 

RGG texted me at 6:30 and let me know they were in and would be over in a bit. I phoned the pizza place (at 6:34) and ordered 2 EXTRA Large pizzas and wings to be delivered. I had an ETA from the shop of 1 hour, which was pushing it a bit (since we almost always eat at 6pm at our place) but I figured that we had some snacks hanging about and it wouldn’t be too bad just this once…

 

And this was about the time that G started her fussing.

 

Again, G is particular. She doesn’t like things not to go exactly as planned. And she did NOT plan on having until almost 8pm to eat supper (heck, my kids usually got to BED at and she hadn’t had lunch (again, I hadn’t even had breakfast, I had a handful of poppycock popcorn and a mediocre cup of hotel room coffee), and had figured that I should have ordered food for US at 5pm and not waited until RGG and his daughters came, so she was starting to get surly. Added to that was the fact that my kids, already hungry, were getting keyed up, and I was nervous abou the prospect of RGG meeting my kids (and G, which in itself is completely nerve wracking because what if she doesn’t BEHAVE?) and what to say to them and how to introduce them to him and what if the kids didn’t get along and what if G said something nasty and… and… and…