Many things about the way the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) runs our local schools are puzzling. One is that the children have to go back to school after Summer Break in the middle of August when it’s just starting to heat up here in LA (and should really be summer break!). And then we are given a number of random days off, including Admissions Day (the Friday before Labor Day weekend), then today (September 14, which is sort of Rosh Hashanah), next Wednesday (September 23, sort of Yom Kippur) and then the whole week of Thanksgiving! For parents who work, it is practically impossible to find someone to care for their children on random days since there are no camps for those single days or odd weeks. For this parent, who has a mid-November book deadline and several lectures to prepare, and can’t work when her son’s at home, it’s positively terrifying.

Today, luckily, my sister Roshan who lives a forty-minute drive from here, heroically took our son Theo for a sleepover last night and half of today, which allowed me to get a fair amount of work done (of course, she got none of her work done. Thank you, Rosh!). After lunch I headed over to her place, we all baked brownies together, and then I drove Theo home in time for his piano lesson, during which time, I tried in vain to do more work. Then I made dinner, after which Theo wanted to discuss the elaborate design he had in mind for his birthday cake. His birthday is in 2 days, so I started panicking about being able to create such a complex cake in next to no times, but then I realized that his party is actually 12 days away. Phew! However, since my husband David was attending a neighborhood meeting at the school, I decided to go with Theo to ToysRUs to pick up some of the decorations we needed. I had an ulterior motive for the outing though – my Giveaway. I hadn’t had time all day to make a gift so I brought a small monkey jigsaw puzzle that Theo must have received in a goody bag at a birthday party. As we left the store, I left it by the store exit so that some child might find it there. Or even another puzzled parent looking for something else to give their child to do on one of these random days off school.