By the way.
Somewhere in between the Care Bears and Raffi years and those filled with Paula Abdul, Madonna, and New Kids on the Block, I almost wore out the Joe Scruggs tape that had By the Way on it.
I thought the song’s story of a little boy who forgot to tell his mom all the things he needed for school until Monday morning was hilarious. And I giggled at lines like “if it’s lemonade, will the teacher understand?” Because of course the teacher wouldn’t understand! She asked for an orange juice can!
Now that I’m a parent of a preschooler, and one parenting overseas at that, I finally understand why the song only elicited half-laughs from my own mother.
Oh, by the way…
I thought I was safe after the not-quite-the-right-diya near-disaster of a few weeks ago.
{See related post: Homework.}
I was not.
In the middle of lunch on Wednesday, my WhatsApp buzzed to inform me that students should dress up in traditional {Indian} clothes for the Diwali party on Friday morning.
Cue my semi-panic: Nicolas had none.
I quickly did the mental math. Wednesday was going to be all but shot by the time I was done with my 7 Cities tour and ladies-who-lunch duties. (And that was before we hit major traffic getting back home thanks to the announcement of party tickets for the upcoming elections.) I resigned myself to rejigging my Thursday schedule to not, as I had planned, work on much-needed tasks for my coaching business and instead spend the time finding appropriate attire for my 2.5 year old.
The embassy moms’ group suggested three options: head to Sarajoni Nagar Market (cheap but almost certainly a total zoo right before next Monday’s holiday), order from First Cry if I could find anything with 1-day delivery (I could not), or head to FabIndia.
Yesterday morning found me in the back of a taxi with a tee-shirt and pair of pants from Nicolas’s dresser shoved in my purse. (Would you risk buying something that wasn’t actually going to fit?!)
With the help of the salesgal, it didn’t take long to find a stunning teal kurta and a comfy pair of drawstring pajama pants. A helpful local mom shopping for her own similarly-aged son assured me that it was absolutely acceptable to roll the pant legs up a bit since there’d be no time for tailoring.
With that mission accomplished, I ducked into the stationer’s store for a package of decorated cash envelopes so that I could give our trash man the customary gift and then celebrated my mission accomplished with a coffee tonic at Blue Tokai.
I was so. good. to. go., right?
You already know there was a plot twist.
At 4:30 yesterday, my phone buzzed again. This time with a semi-cryptic note not only reminding parents about the party’s dress code but also informing us that we should “send party food for the same.”
WHAT?!
With Joe not due home until very late at night, I only had an hour to conjure up whatever was going to be conjured before our nanny headed home to her own family for the night. And after waiting 10 minutes for the school to respond to my inquiry of what would be appropriate and for how many, I realized I just didn’t have any time to spare.
I’m pretty sure the neighborhood now thinks I’m nuts. (Or maybe they already did.) As one of the few residents on the block without a driver, I’m sure I looked a sight as I hoofed it over to the local sweet shop where I figured I’d find something.
And I found something alright: a line of men twenty deep. The best I could tell, about half of them were getting something sweet after a hard day’s work and the other half were drivers running errands for their employers. It wasn’t even that I was clearly out of place. It was the calculation I did after glancing at my watch. With no time to spare, I needed to hightail it back home and move to Plan B.
Plan B: bake peanut butter cookies.
Now, my friends, this is the point where I need to remind you that our household goods are still on a boat somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. I’m on Welcome Kit cooking, supplemented by the couple of kitchen things I threw in our air freight. I had measuring spoons but no cups and no mixing bowl. The level of difficulty only went up from there. Brown sugar, as Americans know it, isn’t a thing here. (At least that I’ve been able to find).
“No sweat, I’ve kinda sorta got this,” I told myself as I simultaneously prepped Nicolas’s dinner and did the conversion from cups to grams so that I could weigh everything out on our coffee scale before dumping it into my large-saucepan-cum-mixing-bowl. (There will be no judgement that I didn’t argue when my kid was happy to eat trail mix and a paratha with cheese on it last night.)
When my husband finally got home, long after Nicolas’s had been showered and tucked into bed by yours truly, he wasn’t greeted by a wife who was excited to see him after more than a week away. Nope. He was greeted by a petite cookie and a demand that he determine whether or not they were bringable for school.
“They’re good if you don’t know what a peanut butter cookie is supposed to taste like,” was a review good enough for me. I packaged up all 36 of them up carefully before throwing in the towel for the night.
And, oh, by the way?
Turns out that the note to bring “party food” wasn’t about preparing a snack for everybody in class to share.
Of course not.
It was about making sure that my kid’s tiffin was filled with celebratory noshes and not just the normal veggies and sandwich like always.
Preschool 1. Emily 0.
If it’s lemonade, will the teacher understand?
