Parents' Day

Hey y'all -

I didn't get a Mother's Day this year. When May 12th rolled around, I was working in Vermont. I woke up to all my mom friends posting on facebook about their homemade breakfasts and sunny family hikes and perfect mornings and blah blah blah hush. Instead, I looked despondent enough at the local diner for the waitress to give me a free piece of key lime pie. I thought maybe I'd get a make-up Mother's Day, but that didn't really happen, either. So when Father's Day arrived last Sunday, I told Thor we could split the glory and celebrate together: Parents' Day.

The best part about this new completely fabricated holiday is it's traditional to spend it away from your children. That may seem counterintuitive - to run away from the very same small people who made you parents in the first place, but it's my holiday and I make the rules. [Semi-related: If you've never seen the episode of Seinfeld where the Costanzas explain Festivus, you should].

Grandma Sue volunteered to have a sleepover with you guys, and your dad and I decided to drive over to Spokane.

Certain people did not want to see us go.

We stopped at the new local doughnut place on the way out of town, where we bought too many doughnuts and then ate them with large coffees. We had the shakes all the way to Washington.

We spent the day shopping in Spokane. Cool groceries! Light fixtures! Decorative hooks and knobs! On our big, wild, adults-only getaway, we found ourselves in a housewares department where your dad yelled, "Look, babe! They have woks!" We are so rock n' roll.

We went out for a nice dinner and walked around downtown and spent the night at the Davenport.

The next morning, we drove to the military base so your dad and I could get updated IDs. And let me tell you what happened there, so if you ever see someone having a breakdown at the DMV and yelling, "This system couldn't be any more bureaucratic and stupid!" you'll be able to tell them they're wrong, because the DMV isn't run by the United States military. 

Modern military IDs have a microchip-type thing implanted in the card that has all kinds of information stored on it. We were the first people to arrive at the ID office at 7:30am Monday. For an hour and forty minutes, we sat in a beige cubicle while a woman tried over and over, unsuccessfully, to update this chip on your dad's card. That's when she told us, "The system is down worldwide." And for all that time that we had been in her cubicle, other people had shown up in the office to wait for their IDs. I saw a man wait almost two hours - the entire time we were there - only to make it to the cubicle next to us where the employee in that cubicle repeated the process, all the while knowing the system was shut down worldwide. At no point did someone stand up and make a general announcement to the waiting area like, "Hey y'all, just so you know, you have no hope in hell of getting an ID today, so instead of reading that nine year-old copy of Redbook for the third time, maybe you could go out and accomplish something else with your day." Instead, everyone waited, everyone tried to get a new card, everyone was eventually told it wasn't going to work - but only after they'd served their own time in cubicle hell. 

Your dad is tired of me telling this story, but really it's the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. 

Love,

Mom