Care Package

I've been back for just under two months...so why do I need a care package already?

Well, I forgot some really essential stuff: like pepperoni and mapleine! The first Friday night I was back, I set to work making my pizza crust and sauce. Then it was time to put on the toppings. I opened the freezer and knew: I forgot to buy pepperoni in the U.S. How could I possibly forget that?

One morning I was all set to make pancakes and suddenly realized that my bottle of mapleine was finished! I just couldn't bring myself to buy a $5 bottle of imported syrup, not just because of the price, but also because I'm afraid my kids might really like it and then reject my homemade syrup. I guess I could have made fruit syrup, but I wasn't quite motivated to do that yet.

The other day the kids and I were making dill pickles. We're all crazy about dill pickles--with the exception of Bayo. I just about had a panic attack when I couldn't find my dill seed. For a minute I wondered if I had forgotten to buy that too. Thankfully I found some--and I got a lot more today in my care package. Ahh, the essentials of life.

I had made a shopping list before I left Nigeria, but the strange thing is I never consulted it in the U.S. In fact, I don't even know where it is.

But the biggest reason I needed a care package was because so many of Bayo's books for his online class arrived a few days after I left the U.S. I had worked on ordering them a month before my departure, but I had some terrible computer viruses that wouldn't allow my Amazon order to go through. Finally I got everything ordered about two weeks before my travel date, but the books arrived very slowly, probably because it was a large order.

So now I'm content for awhile--I've got my pizza, my pancakes, and my pickles!