I’ve Run Out of Tricks! Send Them Back To School!!

As much as I love my 2 children, I am ready to box them and ship them to China!!! This past week, with Nick back to work and thus no van to run errands with, has been a real test of my patience as a Mom.

They have played well together for the occasional small stretch and Erin even invented her own comic book this week about a tiny vampire chipmunk that runs around trying to nibble people’s ankles because he’s lonely (rather than evil) but when I cam up from checking e-mail this morning to find that they had strung a “tightrope” for their Barbies to slide along that was halfway to pulling a desk drawer handle out of the desk!! Luckily a friend of Erin’s had won a pass to the local water park and offered to take her along this afternoon, so that just left me with Bethany. She and I walked up to the park behind the post office then mailed some letters that needed to go off and paid the power bill on the walk home. It was only about 15 minutes each way, but by the home stretch her legs were “going to fall off if she didn’t get something good to eat”! Hah!

My latest order of plastic bags to hold my chartpacks also arrived this morning, but they are different from the ones I usually get with more plastic above the hang hole. That will just get in the way on most shipments, so I called them to ask if they’d changed suppliers. Apparently no one there bothered to look at my order before they sent them out and their first comment to me was “Yes, those look very different, don’t they. We’re not sure what’s up either!!” What a way to instill confidence!! I’m going to keep 1000 to handle the orders I have to ship out and kits for Toronto in October, but then send the other 2000 back and have them send me my regular bags. Sigh! A quick check on their part before sending things on to me could have saved us all a lot of trouble!

Well, the girls are finally down so I am off to watch Hidalgo with my husband for date night upstairs... and maybe by the morning the urge to mail my offspring will have calmed down. They do look very cute once they are asleep.....

Missing Designs....

The Postal System has eaten another parcel!! While on vacation, I did receive a few e-mails from stores that were trying to reorder our newest designs that we released in Columbus from Hoffman. Before we left to visit my Mom at the end of June, I mailed out the copies of the new designs to Hoffman, so I was baffled as to why they wouldn’t have them yet. As it turns out, that parcel never arrived!! Hoffman never e-mailed me in follow-up once I had sent my price information in, but I probably should have remembered to check all the parcel slips like I usually do to make sure that the trackable stuff arrived!!

After almost half an hour on the phone with the post office, they are almost as baffled as I am as to where the parcel could have gone, but they have opened an inquiry. The parcel was insured, so that means that I will get some of my money back, but now I need to sit down and make up a replacement order and get that off as soon as possible. I picked up the charts from the copy center this afternoon and a new shipment of bags is on its way from Toronto because another order just used up all but 100.

There are times when I wish that I lived close enough to the US border to drive my orders across and ship them from within the USA... but 3 hours each way makes that a bit pricey!!

The girls are getting very restless and I will be quite glad when they head back to school. As much as I love my family, I have also missed having the quiet time to get my work done that now only comes if I stay up after everyone has gone to bed!!