We took the entire fifth grade to see "The Prince and the Pauper" today. Then we came back and had classroom Valentine’s day parties.

Let’s just say that I will be appreciating peace and quite once I finally get some!

The kids were quite good on the trip, even though the play was far too long for a children’s show. The first act was 75 minutes long. That was even too long for me to sit through.

I’m not sure why they felt the need to make the act so long. They could have divided the act into two parts and it wouldn’t have made any difference. The running time for the entire show was two hours and forty minutes. And this wasn’t even a musical.

The production was probably good, but everyone was getting so antsy that much of it was lost.

Part of the reason for the antsyness was the lack of amplification of voices and the lack of memorization of the actors. There were some huge white spaces where someone was supposed to speak, but no one on stage seemed sure of who that someone might be.

It was a long morning.

I was having fun sitting next to one of the very disabled kids who is in a special program that is housed in our building. I just love Mickey. He looked at me at one point and said, "I wanna go home". It was all I could do to not say, "Me too!", but I refrained.

I also got a charge out of him as we neared the end of the play and I told him it was almost over. He almost shouted "fifteen seconds!". I just had to remind him to use a quiet voice.

At least he kept me awake.

The Valentine parties are simple another term for "sugar high". These kids were totally wired by the time they went home.

I had bus duty and kept thinking that I was glad that it was the mothers who were going to have to deal with them. They were almost bouncing down the sidewalk as they trooped out of the building.

They are awfully cute about giving Valentine’s though. Some of the handmade ones are the best.

I swung by my mother’s on the way home (actually it’s out of my way) so I could give her a card and gift. Nothing major, just a little something. I figured that the first one without my father might be tough.

I realized the other day that I took the box of candy that my father gave me last Valentine’s Day and put it in the fridge. I never opened it.

I wonder why? Was it some sort of a premonition that it would be the last one that he’d ever give me?

Makes me puzzled.