Twas the Week Before Christmas.

This quick post is a compilation of all the posts I wanted to send before Christmas. I tried to be short. But at 5'4", I'm pretty much there. This post is much shorter.

It could've been a really bad week -- a REALLY bad week. After all, it started with me running out of green tea bags. I know! How did I survive, right?!

And I was still sick, and now Roomie was sick too.

Oh, and thanks to the cold dump courtesy of the Winter Warlock before Kris gave him the toy train, I actually had to suffer through temperatures way out of my 22C to 27C comfort zone. Stop laughing.

No, I didn't want to leave the house, but with Roomie feeling worse than me, I had to continue my daily duties as chauffeur, lunch lady, and laundress.

You'd think the cold, the illness, and the catastrophic lack of green tea -- and the forced labour in such harrowing conditions -- would get me down.

Noooooooooooo way, man! Really, it could've been worse.

Instead, I focused my remaining healthy cells on enjoying my kids' last week of school before the Holiday Break.

Thursday was Mini's Christmas Sharing Performance, so I wrapped up the banana muffins I volunteered to bake for the event and headed over to the school. Of course, I had in tow a very sniffly Roomie, who wouldn't let fire, the Black Plague, or even the Spanish Inquisition, let alone a bad flu, keep him from watching his little girl sing and dance wearing a candy cane hat.

We got Lam from his classroom so he could join us in watching Mini's Nursery/Kindergarten class perform classics like "Chicken Soup with Rice" and "A - You're Adorable". However, my favourite was "Tony Chestnut" -- a racy song about a love quadrangle between Eileen, Neil, Pat, and Bob -- complete with actions. Don't you just love songs with a touch of controversy?

Needless to say, the kids were adorable beyond words. You can almost hear the ovaries exploding all over the room. Seriously, even for me, it was a close call.

At the end of the show, all the kids were allowed to bring home the life-sized effigies they painted of themselves. Mini's is tacked up on the wall in our foyer. It's a little shocking sometimes, but still cute.

By far, though, my most challenging task of the week was bringing the coins that Mini and her classmates collected for Pennies from Heaven to our local paper. I volunteered to drive the "armoured car".
The almost $700 donated by the kids was up from the regular $400 average they usually do every year, which was a wonderful feat. The coins filled 4 mandarin orange boxes, and they were HEAVY. The boxes in my trunk really helped with traction, but boy, driving across town was certainly nerve-wracking! Luckily, I had my hired goon/bodyguard -- Roomie -- with me, and all went well. Good deed accomplished.

Now, Christmas -- that was another fun week...