You’ll all remember this post, surely, in which I detailed Lydia’s yearning for this season’s “it” footwear, Crocs. Taking pity on her eldest grandchild, my mother searched out a pair-paying less than half of what they’d have cost in Sweden–and sent them winging across the Atlantic via USPS Express Mail. Using her handy-dandy tracking number, she learned that the shoes had arrived in Sweden on August 11, a mere three days after she’d sent them from Idaho. Not bad, we thought, fully expecting they would reach us the next Monday, August 14.

That expectation was not met.

Okay, Tuesday, then, I thought. Still not bad.

But Tuesday came and went, and Lydia was still Croc-less. Then Wednesday, then Thursday, then Friday, then all the rest of the days, and our mailbox remained woefully empty of Crocs. We had begun to fear that they’d been stolen. Yesterday evening I emailed my mom and asked her to send me the tracking number so that I could see if I could locate them from this end. This morning I had a mail back from her with the number, and a quick search on the Swedish postal service’s site pinned down the shoes’ location — the little gas-station-cum-post-office not a thousand meters from our house. Apparently they had arrived more than a week ago, and one way or another we had missed the package slip.

Olof hot-footed it over there and came back bearing the package that had caused me and my mom so much anxiety over the past two weeks. (The one thing that saved the whole affair from being a major disaster was that the shoes were to be a surprise, so it was only me, and not Lydia, being disappointed at the mailbox day after day.) Luckily, though much time had passed, her zeal for Crocs had not waned. If anything, she wanted them more, particularly after going back to school yesterday and finding that EVERYONE ELSE had a pair. She offered to clean the entire house, or go a whole year without her allowance, if only I would buy some for her. Last night she was so depressed over the whole matter that she actually cried herself to sleep.

Once I had the package in hand, I did a quick open-and-check to make sure that all was as it should be, then re-wrapped it and waited very impatiently for Lydia to come home from school at three o’clock. Not wanting to miss the big event, Olof took a break from work and Helena came over from her place, so we were quite a crowd in the kitchen when Lydia arrived.

She noticed the package on the counter almost at once, and asked if she could open it. I made a show of being reluctant, but let her talk me into it. And, lucky readers, I caught it all on video (forgive the sideways-ness on the last one — I took these with our digital camera, and can’t edit them):

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