is anyone out there???

loose screws are the least of my problems...

The dreaded call home from school. It always makes me panic because it never means something good.

"Mom, my glasses broke," my daughter informed me. "Okay, that's not too bad." I asked her where her contacts were and she told me which bathroom and which cupboard they were in. I was fairly confident I could drop them off without too much problem.

I got to the school office and told the secretary that I needed to drop off my daughter's contacts. She waited for me to give them to her. "That would be easier, but you'll have to call her to come to the office," I told the secretary. She decided rather than try to figure me out, she'd just have Anna come to the office.

Anna arrived and I handed her a sack full of contact cases. Yes there were contacts in the bathroom. In fact there were several of them, all containing contacts. Apparently my children didn't realize that disposable contacts meant that when you were finished wearing them, you threw them away. She dug through the bag. "Nope, none of these are mine," she had the nerve to tell me, handing the bag back to me.

I had gotten every last contact, so there was nothing else I could do---and I knew Anna was blind without her glasses. "Let me see your glasses," I told her in frustration. "These aren't broken!" I exclaimed trying to see what the problem was. "The screw is gone," she pointed to the loose arm. That was nothing a little tape couldn't fix. A couple of minutes later she was all set to go back to class. I could pick up a screw later.

"It turns out I just have a screw loose," I told the secretary as I turned to leave, taking the bag of contacts with me. They would come in handy later that night at dinner when I asked the kids if any of them could define "disposable" for me...