A Very! Exciting! Day!
Today was field day at my kid’s school. This is the day that all the students are herded by harried teachers through a series of outdoor games and activities until they are sunburned, sweaty, and tired. Then they pause for lunch where the PTA obligingly sells various forms of colored and flavored sugar, which the children then ingest or apply in a sticky layer all over themselves. I did not send any money with my kids, but somehow they acquired piles of sugar anyway. I suspect charitable friends with too much money to spend. Thus the kids come home wired and tired, but having had a marvelous time. Many years I’ve been present at the school for most of the events. This year I had work to do, so Patch and I stayed home. This had the advantage that Patch was not cranky and tired the way that Gleek was. This afternoon Gleek had the attention span of a fruit fly, the stubbornness of a goat, and the cooperativeness of a cat.
Usually I just let the kids crash and have a slow afternoon on field day. This year that wasn’t an option, since this evening featured both Patch’s preschool graduation and Link’s cub scout boat race. Gleek was marvelously well behaved for the graduation. This is probably because the graduation was mostly a musical program performed by the kids. Gleek loves music. Also the graduation was outdoors and she found a pile of seed pods to carefully pick apart. The program went well. The little kids all sang loud and did motions to a variety of cutesy kid songs such as “In the good old summer time,” “You are my sunshine,” and “Daisy.” Well, most of the kids sang loud. Patch did not sing at all. I was prepared for this since weeks ago he was complaining to me about singing practice and how he didn’t sing the words, but just did all the motions. I suspect he would have been more enthusiastic about the whole idea of singing if there had been a cool pirate or space ship song in there. Ah well. It was still adorable and I took the requisite number of pictures. Then there were treats.
We dashed straight from the graduation to see Link’s boat race. His boat did well, winning about half of its races. Link had a great time, Patch got to watch a movie, and Gleek ran in laps around the building. I had hopes that she was burning off the last of the sugar, but then they handed out Popsicles as a post-race treat. Is it any wonder that Americans tend to be over weight, when even our healthy events feature a large sprinkling of sugar?
The last event was a quick drive down to dragon’s keep to deliver Howard’s asthma inhaler to him. He’d had an allergy attack. Gleek and Patch went on that trip. Amazingly it did not feature any extra treat food. We returned home and it was late. We still have school tomorrow. I gave them each a single cookie as a bedtime snack. This is probably awful of me considering the amount of treat food they’d eaten today. At least these cookies had some flour, butter, and egg in them along with the sugar. It was probably one of the healthier things they’d eaten during the day. Then I tumbled them all into pajamas and into bed. I’m too tired to bathe them tonight. Tomorrow we’ll see what we can do to remove the caked-on layers of sunscreen, sweaty, sticky, dirty, and tangled. For now I look at my grubby children in their beds and know that for them today was the Best! Day! Ever!