Lev­el 8 Skate at last!

It’s been an uphill strug­gle, accord­ing to Avery, the dread­ed required “mohawk” being a near­ly impos­si­ble feat to achieve. But it’s final­ly been done! And as a reward, she final­ly got the Fine Red Shoes about which she has been dream­ing for months and months. There’s a love­ly shop in the Maryle­bone High Street called Rachel Riley, full of clothes for most­ly chil­dren, but I did get a very wear­able and yet chic tweed skirt with leather buck­les for myself. Last spring Avery saw a pair of shoes there that exceed­ed what even I will spend on my child (and for sure she is bet­ter dressed than am I). So I had to put my foot, so to speak, down, and she was all right with that. Some things are just too crazy.

But we nev­er for­got them, and every once in awhile vis­it­ed them in the shop, just to see if they had gone on sale, but they nev­er did. Until last week! John and I were out and about in the street wait­ing to pick Avery up from some­thing or oth­er, and there they were, mas­sive­ly dis­count­ed and in her size. What to keep them for, though? It came to us: Lev­el 8. So today was the day. She jumped up and down and screamed. “This is what I wished for when I threw my coin into the Tre­vi Foun­tain in Rome!” Good on you, Aves. Her school friends Isabelle and Sarah just hap­pened to be there to share the glo­ry, which was nice.

Now we are off (after meat­loaf sand­wich­es for lunch, not to be despised) to see “Miss Pot­ter,” the Beat­rix Pot­ter sto­ry with Renee Zell­weger. Not sure about her, but every­one says her Eng­lish accent is remark­able, and it’s a grey, rainy, spit­ty day so we need some cheer.

All this friv­o­li­ty serves a dual pur­pose: to mark the last day of the long Christ­mas vac, and to put off for one more day the awful task of clean­ing out the kitchen pantry. John is con­vinced that if I throw away every bot­tle with a quar­ter of an inch of bal­sam­ic vine­gar, every plas­tic bag with five pine nuts, every con­tain­er of out­dat­ed bak­ing soda, every spice with price tags in pounds from the LAST time we lived in Lon­don, we won’t actu­al­ly have to move. We will all be able to live JUST IN THE KITCHEN. Any­thing to make him hap­py… In the mean­time, con­grat­u­la­to­ry telegrams from all over the skat­ing world are pour­ing in for Avery, and I must run answer the door one more time.