Songkran’s round the corner and today marks the last day of the school term; which means that from tomorrow onwards,  the kids will have lots of time on their hands to create more mayhem, tearing the house down for the next 2 weeks!

As with all other last days of the term, the school would always have some sort of activity for the kids. This, without fail,  usually means that the parents would have to dress their kids up in some theme they come up with and, on top of that, they require us to prepare a dish for the kids to bring along.

We were also informed prior that in the spirit of Songkran coming up in about a week+,  we need to bring along their bathing suits because there’ll be lots of water play. Easy enough! But, that’s not all – we also have to dress the kids up in purple because the last day of the term also happens to fall on the Princess’s birthday; the colour representing Saturday – the day the Princess was born in 1955.

On top of having to dress them up in purple, Spud has also been constantly reminding me since last week that they were required to wear a flowery-themed shirt (symbolical of Songkran celebration) as well. It was something which her homeroom teacher had not told us about, but she was adamantly confident about it, telling us that her Thai Language teacher had made that a requirement for all students.

Herein lies in the problem: The kids neither have purple-coloured nor flowery-Songkran type clothes. And I have been searching for several days at the day-market near my office to look for them, in their sizes, with no success…resulting in Spud being extremely pouty and disappointed when I came home empty-handed in the last few days. Where are all these things when you really need them?!!

I guess I could have just ignored it, let her pout and dress them up in their bathing suits with a purple ribbon or something! I could have just told her we have no more money left to buy stuff and leave it at at…but that would mean pulling teeth trying to get her out of the house in only her bathing suit the next day. I was in no capacity to handle another morning drama…

So, as dog tired as I was yesterday after a 10-hour work day, we hauled our asses to Big C – a hypermarket the likes of Walmart,  to scour for something purple and something flowery and a few ingredients for me to cook up their dish for the next day. We didn’t even have our dinner first!

Very fortunately, we got what we wanted within half an hour in Big C and with a grand total of 711 Baht (29.74 SGD), we hauled back 3 flowery shirts, 2 purple tees and 4 shorts – all for the kids!

 

These clothes would probably fall apart after the 2nd wash if you are lucky enough, but when it comes to crunch times like this, you gotta love Thailand for such prices. Not to mention an easy find without having to scour the entire city for them and for one shirt costing only 69 Baht(less than 3 SGD), that’s a steal, no!

I still had to spend another 45 minutes prepping the dish they had to bring when we got home at 9 p.m and by the time I was done cooking a simple kid-friendly fried rice, I was over-hungry and ready to collapse…

…which I might as well have, because it turned out that when we dropped them off to school this morning, they didn’t need the flowery crap. All because the said -Thai Language teacher had misinformed the students about what to wear.

After all that trouble in such rush, I could only sigh. What if I was really skint and 711 Baht was all I could afford for the entire month?! *Growl*

And, now that the kids make their own decisions of what to wear and make such a big fuss while at it too if we suggest something else, I reckon these shirts will be shoved in their cupboards and never see the light of the day again.