The Mad Scramble

It's amazing how many things a family needs to do before leaving for 11 weeks. We've been spending up a storm with all the little things we're realizing we need. This is apparently out of the ordinary for us because our credit card was flagged last week as "potentially compromised". When I called to follow up, I was told there was a possibility of fraud and that they were going to cancel the card and send me a new one.
"Did I mention I was leaving for 11 weeks and this is REALLY not a good time to leave me without a card?" I asked (calmly of course...).
"Well, there is has been a lot of purchases on your card today."
"Yes, did I mention I was leaving for 11 weeks and needed to buy things for the trip?"
"Well, maybe we can go through the recent purchases and just make sure they're all legit. Did you shop at ---?"
"Yes"
"And at --"
"Yes"
"And at --"
"Yes"
"And at --"
"Oh my god, yes! Did I mention we're leaving for ELEVEN weeks?!"
Moral of the story? Use your credit card all the time so that when you need to prepare for something like five weeks in Ghana and five weeks in France, it won't raise any flags. This has the added bonus of supporting the create capitalist utopia that is our economy. I live to make Jim Flaherty proud!

Today was family day in Ontario and all the stores were closed so we had to curtail our shopping for today. Instead we spent the day doing Sylvie's hair. It took the better part of the day to take the old braids out, wash the hair and then re-braid. Sylvie gets her TV/movie fix on hair days. Today she watched 4 episodes of Pippi Longstocking, 2 episodes of Geronimo Stilton and all of Monsters vs Aliens. It's unlikely we'll be watching much television for most of the time in Ghana so stocking up this week might not be such a bad thing.