The first thing I saw when we hit the playground this morning was this:

Yes, Hot Lunch is back despite urgings to call it “Fun Lunch” by less innocent members of the school community. Fun Lunch is good, if you care about such things as lunch. Hot Lunch is something utterly different.

It’s Hot Fun Lunch today because it’s also Sports Day. When the kids finish sack-racing and tug-of-warring and something called the shoe relay, they get to have hot pizza instead of resorting to whatever desperate mix of randomness parents like my mother put in their lunch bags. Although Fun Lunch represents a minor shakedown for money that could arguably have been spent on liquor, it gives parents a break from packing lunches and breaks up the monotony for the kids.

I started mentioning this to the kids this morning and was immediately shut down by our mother, who said the information was strictly need-to-know. She then put an oven mitt on my head.

It was a Cuisinart oven mitt, a second generation of the failed Puppet Mitt with Silicone Grip I complained about last week, which had arrived via FedEx with a lovely note encouraging us to enjoy it along with another mitt, a silicone hot mat, a potholder, and a dish towel, all sent by Best Brands, Cuisinart’s manufacturer of said items.

Truth be told, my parents were one hundred percent more slightly more excited than I at the arrival of free Cuisinart swag. I hadn’t written my letter to Cuisinart with any ulterior intentions of getting free stuff, you see. I was just being a jerk that day and wrote a horrible letter thinking that it would be promptly round-filed.

One good aspect of that horrible letter (aside from the kitchen freebies) was that my mum announced the end of Dry Weekdays. She said obviously I was under a great deal of stress and that she would therefore relent, otherwise I’d end up badgering everyone we’d ever bought something from and being even more of a nuisance than I was already. Booyah!