After asking me last night if it was okay, Lydia brought her friend, Sandra, home with her after school today. Olof and I had made plans earlier to go to take the kids to town for dinner, but Sandra told me that her mom was going to pick her up around five, so all systems were go.

At four-thirty, Lydia asked me when we were going to have dinner, so without going into details, I told her, “Later.”

“When later?” she wanted to know. “Sandra’s mom is coming at ten after five.”

“Sometime after that, then,” I said.

“No, it can’t be after that! Then Sandra won’t have any dinner!”

“What?” I asked, not understanding.

“They’re not going home for a while, and she was supposed to eat!”

“You were supposed to eat here?” I asked Sandra, who–looking at me with puppy-dog eyes–confirmed that she was.

Grrrrr. Even if we hadn’t been planning to go to town for dinner, we never eat early enough that we’re finished by ten after five, and even if I’d felt like cooking dinner just then, I had only about fifteen minutes, tops, before I needed to serve something up to Sandra.

Luckily, I remembered that I had a bag of pytt i panna in the freezer, plus the requisite eggs and pickled beets in the fridge, so after clearing it with Sandra (she’s a notoriously picky eater), I fried her up a serving and set it before her with just enough time for her to eat it before her mother rang the bell.

And though we didn’t make it to Subway before they closed, as I’d hoped we would, we did have a nice Chinese dinner in town, and full bellies all around are all that really matters.