In my opinion, when the phone rings before 9:00 in the morning, it's not going to be good news. That definitely proved to be the case when the phone rang at my house at 7:30 this morning. Before I picked up the phone, I thought that maybe it was just my neighbor calling to let me know that she was on her way over to pick up the cookie dough that she'd sold for us at her office, but when I looked at the Caller ID I saw that it was not her number but the number of the grandparents of one of Alison's classmates. Oh joy! There are only two reasons for calling that early on a school day. One is that the school is closed for weather related reasons, and cold and cloudy is not going to close the school. The other is that they need someone to co-op for them.

Now, if they had called yesterday, I could have just pretended that I wasn't home, let the machine pick up, and hope that they found someone else before I "got the message." But that's not something I could really do at 7:30 in the morning. So I answered the phone, and yes, Classmate was sick and they needed someone to co-op. I had just gone on the field trip on Monday and worked my scheduled co-op day on Wednesday, and I really didn't want to work again today, but, since I didn't have anything else planned -- other than finishing up the newsletter -- I felt guilty about saying no. So I went to school again this morning.

The good news is that the kids weren't quite as crazy as the were on Wednesday. But it was still an eventful day. One little girl cried when her mom left and wanted no part of getting her picture taken (it was picture day today). Then in the middle of our "work" period, the fire alarm went off. We had just been told in our class meeting Tuesday night that they were going to have another fire drill soon, but this wasn't it. A couple of ladies from the church office came out to see if we needed any help, since no one knew what was going on and they had to evacuate, too. You know it's not good when even the head maintenance guy doesn't know what's going on. It turns out that everything was fine...there's some construction going on in the church and one of the workers somehow accidentally set the alarm off.

I'm so glad that tomorrow is Saturday. Kevin will be home and I am planning to abdicate my authority to him for the day so I can take care of the things I need to do. I'm not dealing with anything that doesn't involve blood or serious bodily injury.