Tiny Rant

Okay, so, if your son was going to basketball camp, hours 9-1, and the confirmation letter said "The children will break for a snack around 11," what would you think?

I would think, in fact I thought, that the children would break for a snack around 11. And that I should plan on feeding NSLR lunch at 1 when I picked him up, and make sure he had the calories he needed to make it through four hours of basketball with a snack break at 11.

But if I were all the other mothers, I would know that that sentence actually means, "The children will eat an entire lunch, that you had the sense to pack, at 11:30." So NSLR called me the first day to ask why he had several snacks, but no lunch. Answer: because I am lacking the common sense/ESP/rumor mill that tells people these things. Things such as "once we start having half days at the end of the school year, they're all half days, even if the calendar does not identify a particular day as such." Or "although we've never mentioned it, if you want to bring home Nutmeg the guinea pig for the weekend, you sign up on the sheet that hangs on the back of the preschool director's door" (I'm actually pretty psyched I missed out on that one).

Starting Tuesday, R. brought a sumptuous lunch.

NSBR is always saying that I read too much into the things people say (and write). But sometimes it seems to me that I have the opposite problem, that I take people's communication at face value, and they are like Humpty Dumpty in Alice In Wonderland: words mean what they want them to mean.