Ha ha ha! Just chequing!

Buddy Boy did something today which will haunt him for a very long time to come, something the memory of which will redden his cheeks many years down the road. I was expecting the UPS guy to deliver the new lower tray for our new laser printer, the one that I can load legal-size paper in. But I wanted to take a bath, so I told Buddy Boy that if the guy should come and I was in the tub to sign for the package.

Sure enough, as I languished in my bubbles, reading my book (Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson), the doorbell rang and Buddy Boy ran downstairs to answer it. He yelled upstairs to me, �Mom, do you have $60 in your purse?� and I yelled back, �No! Will he take a cheque?� I had forgotten that there would probably be GST or other taxes to pay, since I had ordered it from the U.S. The next thing I knew, the front door has slammed shut and the truck has driven away.

So I called Buddy Boy upstairs (he stood just inside the bathroom where he couldn�t see me even though I was totally shrouded by bubbles) and asked him what just happened. He said that he wrote the guy a cheque. This is very interesting, because my son doesn�t have a chequing account. He had used my chequebook (a joint account with my husband) and paid the guy $67.00. I very nearly freaked out. If only we could spend other people�s money by signing our names in their chequebooks, wouldn�t life be just wonderful?

I got out of the bath, dried myself and dressed, and phoned the UPS number where I spoke with a very nice man who actually laughed when I told him what had happened. He gave me the address of the depot in Sh�brooke where I could go and straighten the whole thing out with Yves. So I did that (after Hubby got home with the Subaru; there was no way I was going driving on the slippery roads in the Volvo) and gave Yves a new cheque. He promised me that he would rip up the other as soon as the driver arrived back from his rounds.

So, no permanent damage has been done, and Buddy Boy has learned a valuable lesson. You can�t spend other people�s money. Simple. In the meantime, I have installed the tray in my printer (although I haven�t tried it out yet).

This evening we went out en famille to a Vietnamese restaurant (of which we have a plethora in Sh�brooke) with our friends D & S and their two little boys. The younger one (4) is a smart little guy, completely bilingual, very polite and cute as a button. His older brother (6) is the autistic one. He�s also cute as a button and pretty polite, but his language skills lag way behind his younger sibling�s, and he has an oral fixation. Everything had to go into his mouth. I lent the pencil and pen in my purse to the kids so they could draw pictures on their placemats (I got the pen back, but J chewed the shit out of the pencil and there wasn�t enough left of it to bother with). His mom had to remove all cutlery but the spoon as he was mouthing the knife and fork, and then there was the business with the napkin. Never mind. Suffice it to say that this is a real challenge for them raising this boy. S is an incredibly patient and pleasant mother (much nicer than I would be in the same circumstances), but D is the same age as I am, and he must find it a chore. Still, you take what you get in life, and they seem to be taking it rather well.

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