Your Mama Wears Combat Boots, and Field Trip Fun

Hola Wild Boy friends and family, and welcome back to our weekly tour of chaos, mayhem, and shenanigans otherwise known as parenting. It's October 1, and I'm super stoked to be approaching something more like fall here in la Casa. Evening temperatures are cool, the days are nice enough I don't have to sell my soul to Satan to pay my PG&E bill for the air conditioner, and I can now get away with fall scents to cover up the constant underlying reek of body odor and disgusting shoes. It's delightful. The only glaring exception is soccer Saturdays, when regardless of the forecasted high it will be over 90 degrees (largely because the city we play in is roughly twenty feet above Hell itself) thus ensuring that I will sweat off all my sunscreen, be too engrossed yelling at the game to fix it, and will burn to a healthy shade of "my dermatologist is NOT going to be happy with this" every stinking week. But I digress.

This week I actually took a day off work to hang with some of my mom friends and chaperone a field trip for Gabe's class. See, the cop and I to try to be super involved with the boys school whenever possible even when that results in us running in to awards assemblies at the very last minute to snap pictures while in full gear (the cop thinks it's hilarious that when the boys are older and someone tries to tease them with the old "your Mama wears combat boots thing" it'll be true and they won't care) despite stunned looks from the other kids in the audience -


I worked in their classes through second grade, but now we've whittled it down to field trips and fund raisers. Stay tuned for what I'm sure will be a super fun update in November after the cop goes with Gavin for a week to Science Camp.

Anyhow, our field trip this week was Farm Day. Every year the third graders from the entire county get together and descend on the fairgrounds for all kinds of presentations on agriculture and livestock because we live in a REALLY rural area. Confirmation of this comes when you get to Farm Day and the entire third grade population for the county totals 350 kids. I know, you're thinking "Wow, that's barely any kids at all for a whole county." And you're right, it's a small number. UNLESS they've all convened together in one place with large amounts of livestock, and their excitement level is thrumming somewhere just below rock concert level. Then it's a poo ton of kids.

Anyhow, I got put in a group with two great mom friends, one of us designated as leader and two of us designated as "rovers" to just make sure the kids made it from station to station and to run about 80 trips to the bathroom in the course of five hours. The great news is that since typically my trips to the fair involve the rodeo and a few beers, I have a healthy knowledge of where the bathrooms are. Although I suppose this doesn't make me sound like Mom of the Year material, come to think of it. This is probably why organic zucchini muffin mom got put in charge and the other mom and I got relegated to pee patrol, but I'm totally cool with it. Being in charge of eight year olds is way harder then working with parolees. No joke.

The field trip was good times, and Gabe was in little boy heaven, no surprise.


And on the bright side, this time we missed the sheep demonstration which I sat through with Gavin when his class went two years ago.  Not that the sheep aren't cool in their own right, but there were rams, which led to a lot of questions about what that was dangling in the back, followed by twice as many incredulous questions when they got the answers and decided to marvel at the sheer size involved. Pretty sure that demonstrator didn't come back at all this time. That, or she was finally able to get the ground to open up and swallow her whole, which is kind of what it looked like she was hoping for by the time the "how can they even run without tripping?" questions came around.

As a fun little perk, all the kids got bags with informational hand outs, coloring pages, and Sriracha salt to try at home.
 
 
This was wildly entertaining when the cop thought that somehow Gabe managed to bring home a large quantity of poor quality strawberry meth. I love this house.
 
One field trip down for the year, roughly five more to go. Let's hope they all go as smoothly as this one did, because nobody cried and when we loaded them up on the bus nobody was missing. As far as I'm concerned, we nailed it.
 
Now, off to enjoy some cooler weather and apply copious amounts of aloe to recover from soccer yesterday. Until next week, happy fall from la Casa!
 
 



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