A GOOD Friday

I can't remember the last time I needed a day off this badly.
This past week has been hellacious.

MONDAY:

I was going to work 1-9, but I'd forgotten about the fifth meeting with Children's Aid in what now seems to be a neverending series. That appointment was for 4:30, and we had no idea how long it would go. So, after working 11-4, I made arrangements to do something I haven't done in nearly five years: work a night shift.

I must confess to a growing sense of frustration with this adoption process. We were told at the beginning that there are usually four or five homestudy sessions. Now I find out there are at least two more necessary: the next one is two weeks off. At this rate, we'll be asking our kids to call us Grandma and Grandpa.
Worse, the sense that this might all go for nothing is still with me. Tom keeps plucking objections to our raising adopted children out of his head like so much Kleenex. Each of these objections must be discussed at great length until Tom is satified we've overruled them. (Not that he ever says as much--for all we know, he's building a case against us and planning to surprise us with the verdict, say, in about a year.)
And his latest hurdle for us! "Your references are all very positive", he says, "but none of them are much help in telling us how you deal with children." He went on to tell us about the "classic" line--one I guess he'd seen in many references before: "If my children couldn't be with me, they always tell me they'd want to live with..."
Well, didn't I feel dandy. Not only had I neglected to parent a child before undergoing this adoption process, I'd made the error of not befriending other parents and their children.
Many of our recent friendships are with parents of fairly new families, but Children's Aid requires our references to have known us for at least three years.
Tom left us with some profiles of children and asked us how we would "hypothetically" integrate them into our home. Answers are due in two weeks.
Hypothetical is right. There are three profiles. One is of a male only child; the other two are fraternal twins. The singleton is near the top of the age range we're willing to consider. He's been the victim of all and sundry forms of abuse, and the profile hinted that he had seen much worse done to other members of his family. We were okay until we got to the "has heard voices" and "has exhibited destructive behaviour towards animals". The fact that this had occurred a couple of foster homes back and had not been observed again didn't exactly reassure us.
The twins are eight years old--considerably older than we're comfortable with. They were premature babies and have "exhibited cognitive delays in the moderate range". Here's what they call "moderate": The girl hasn't spoken yet. She communicates quite well, apparently, using a mixture of sign language and pictures. Her brother has those same cognitive delays, but the profile doesn't specify how they manifest themselves.

Can I deal with this? Sure. Is it something I want to deal with? Honestly, not really. Interpreting sign language--and, for that matter, pictures--has always been a real challenge for me. It's going to be hard enough to establish trust and love with adopted children without adding in communication barriers.

We had made it clear to Children's Aid that we are willing to take on any number of physical disabilities, but anything beyond a mild learning disability is beyond us. We further defined "mild" as things like attention deficit (doesn't every kid have that?), dyslexia, and so on. So the first time we have pictures and details about actual children to consider, we get--a six year old who hears voices and hurts animals, or a pair of cognitively-delayed twins, one of whom hasn't spoken (it's not made clear whether she can speak or not).

Whew.

MONDAY NIGHT:

With Tom and his charges on my mind, I was unable to nap before I went in to work for 9:00.
The reason I'm here has to do with this flyer we're running. It's HOT. Saturday, we blew our old daily sales record and customer count records away. Recovering from a weekend like that one required a positively massive warehouse order. Said order was due in at 4:00, and the five hours between then and close isn't anywhere near enough to get the shelves stocked. So I volunteered to work overnight, figuring with no customers to bother me or staples like milk to stock, I could get a lot done.
Boy, did I.
Despite the steadily increasing level of fatigue I felt, I was able to get a huge volume of work accomplished. Moreover, I actually enjoyed myself. If I needed confirmation that night shifts in and of themselves don't bother me, it came in spades. I may be shifting to full time nights, when and if kids arrive: I'd sleep while they're in school.


TUESDAY

...if I can remember how to sleep during the day. Wow, I'm tired. Why do you "pull" all-nighters, anyway? I PUSHED that one...through thick mud. I went to bed at 7:30 and dozed in and out until noon, at which point I forced myself out of bed. The last thing I wanted, truth be told, was to sleep too well, and then lay awake all night. By 7:00 p.m, I'm feeling almost ill with exhaustion. My hands and feet seem to be weighted with lead.

I'd forgotten about Circadia, the perverse little imp that lives in my brain stem. She's been largely quiet since I last worked a steady diet of nights, but that one all-nighter revived her and caused her to revive me, shortly before 11:00 p.m., with a cavalry charge: TIME TO GO TO WORK!
Shut up, Circ, you bitch.

WEDNESDAY

I'm back at work, and severely undermanned. An even bigger order than Monday's is coming in. And neither Monday's nor today's was anywhere near big enough.

Just SOME of the stuff on ad in my department this week:

Black Diamond Cheese Bars, $3.97 (regular $6.57)
Philadelphia Cream Cheese, $1.97 (regular $2.97)
Pillsbury Crescent Rolls, $.97 (regular $1.77)
Danone 12-pack yogurt, $2.97 (regular $5.27)
Neilson 10% cream, $2.17 (regular $3.17)

I don't have enough bunkers to properly display all the items I have on ad, which means continuously stocking shelves. I don't have enough refrigeration space to store all my stock. Thank God the nights are still cool enough to turn the trailer attached to one of our loading docks into a refrigerator.
The cheese bars, even with a limit of three, are walking out of the store all by themselves. I hate limits on items for several reasons. One, people don't know about them (or pretend not to) and get very upset when told at the tills that they can't buy 24 bars of cheese. (Many of these people, who invariably say they have large families or are shopping for their entire neighborhoods, are really trying to stock their own store shelves: our retail is much lower than their cost. We're losing almost $2.50 per bar, but they don't care.)
Two, even the people who know about the limit try to cheat it...by coming in again and again and again, or sending their kids through the tills with three bars of cheese each.
Three, upon seeing "Limit: 3 per family", the person who was only going to buy one bar usually buys three. In the end, limits don't limit your sales very much, if at all.

Next up: Holy Thursday...the busiest grocery shopping day of the year.

HOLY THURSDAY, THE BUSIEST GROCERY SHOPPING DAY OF THE YEAR:

Yup, the store is closed tomorrow. Everybody, one, two, three, PANIC!!!

Some very nasty thoughts go through my head on days like this--days before a holiday. I wonder: does anybody have jobs? How is it so many people get Thursday off, when Friday is the holiday?
I arrived this morning to discover I was nearly out of milk. Our milk delivery normally arrives between nine and ten. I called Neilson Dairy to see if they could contact our driver and get him to come here first. They told me the truck had left Georgetown an hour ago, and said they'd try to call the driver.
Two hours later, with nary a bag of milk in the store, I called again. This time I was told the truck was four hours late.
Oh, they picked a great day for this to happen.
You have to suck your gut in to turn around in my dairy aisle, and seemingly every last one of these people is looking for milk--reading the signs is just too much trouble; I hope they didn't actually drive to get here--or cheese (yup, out again, I only ordered 2000 bars for today, so sorry, folks).
Yogurt's also running just a bit late. It was supposed to be here yesterday.
At 2:00, my milk finally showed up. Hot on its heels came the yogurt--about a quarter of what I ordered. I'm beginning to wonder if my head will actually lift off my body and carom around the store, bouncing off carts and shelves.

I've managed to get almost 7,000 bars of cheese couriered to us for sometime this evening. So we'll be in stock for Saturday, at least. But as for today...as for this whole week...I'd like to click and drag it right on over into the Trash. Screw the Recycle Bin--no way would I inflict this on anyone again, least of all myself.

FRIDAY:

I'm OFF! And doing the square root of nothing at all. Hooray.