8/13/09 Skate day, or not

A day of ice skating...or rather, would-be ice-skating.

Gabriel went to ice-skating camp.
Julian went to the CDC, which had a fieldtrip to go ice-skating.
Gabriel's ice-skating camp had a fieldtrip to go swimming.
Gabriel wanted to skip ice-skating camp to go on the ice-skating fieldtrip.
I had a Mom's Night Out to go ice-skating tonight.

Confused yet? Just imagine me the night before, trying to get straight what everyone needs in their knapsacks for the next day!

But in the end, Julian didn't skate much. Gabriel skated a lot, he said, but not with the skating lesson; instead, he's learning hockey-skating from another kid. And I didn't skate at all. All but one mom had to bail tonight, so we'll reschedule. Bummer.

I was one of the bailers, as I spent the better part of the afternoon and evening shopping madly for our upcoming camping trip. The biggest hurdle is food, and now, in my paranoia that I not offer a bang-up menu, I'm completely confident I've gone way, way overboard. It's silly, because the kids would be perfectly living on peanut butter for the weekend.

Can I just say. Peanut butter. Here we are in Silicon Valley, dense with fabulous grocery stores, awash in a culture of fresh healthy eating, and highly aware and reactive to food allergies. Many daycares and schools around here are nut-free, or at least, peanut-free. Yet the only place I can buy soynut butter now, the most obvious alternative (and not obvious at all to kids with enough jelly), is freakin' SAFEWAY! Not Trader Joe's. Not Whole Foods. But lowly Safeway, and for over $6 a jar -- more than twice what I used to buy it for at TJ's before they discontinued it for lack of demand. What is that about? I'm going to need it for a while -- both Katrina's preschool and the boys' CDC daycare are peanut-free.

Katrina herself, however, is approaching 3, when we can finally test her with peanuts. I think the odds of her having a peanut allergy are very, very low; given my complete negligence in label-reading, letting her try things with little more than a passing glance for obvious offending ingredients (oh did that soup have shrimp in it?), and no signs ever of allergic reactions.

A packed day of packing and preparing ahead tomorrow!

8/13/09