D.A.R.E. week

We just finished D.A.R.E. week at the kids' school. The messages were definitely received by my kiddos. I wrote down snippets of the things they told me about it; however, I also put a giant fountain drink on top of the paper with the written snippets and most of the cute sayings bled away. From my memory, however, comes Annie's concern about the widespread plague of substance abuse: "Mom, so many people are drinking drugs and doing cigarettes! It's a big problem."

Graham piped in, "Some people are addicted to nicotine. What are they gonna do without it?" {pause} "I think I'm addicted to scratching my nose. What am I gonna do?"

I don't know what we can do about people who drink drugs. For some reason, this brought to mind an image of pureed opiate juice being downed by smoothie-glugging junkies. It also brought to mind that great SNL Norwegian/New York crime drama I posted last month - "My son is innocent of this!"

Each day of the D.A.R.E. week requires a different outfit or color or theme, i.e. Run Away from Drugs (by wearing sweatpants and tennis shoes). Thursday's theme was I Have Bigger Dreams Than Drugs, and the kids were supposed to dress up as their future profession. Well, Wednesday night was our ward Halloween party. We put plenty of effort into those costumes, and on Thursday morning, we were scrambling to find a future profession outfit for Annie. Finally, out of desperation, she wrote with a black sharpie pen on an old t-shirt: Gy m N a s T.

I'm going to fish that sad t-shirt out of the laundry so I can get a picture. I am sure that any teacher at the school who saw that shirt must have thought, "Poor child to be so alone in this world." If only those parents could have seen Annie's darling costume and face paint the night before. I can do cute, but probably not two days in a row!