A trip to the Aquarium

Today was Bear's class trip to the aquarium. It is always risky volunteering to drive 5 year olds anywhere, but a trip into the city definitely qualifies me for sainthood. Or a good old pat on the back. The van ride was noisy, 4 kids talking at the top of their lungs, veggie tales baring on the stereo, then into the the classroom at the aquarium for a puppet show and some rules. Bear and 2 friends were assigned to a group with a young man whose shirt proudly proclaimed that he was on Work Experience. My 3 kids went from rowdy to the perfect trifecta of silence. He tried to get them to come with a team name. Nope, not happening. At one point they were all hiding behind me.

I knew then that I would need to step up my game and become That Mom. The mom that was uber excited about everything! And asked questions! And always talked with exclamation points! Finally the kids loosened up and started engaging. Poor Greg, he had a schedule and was sticking to it. He just didn't realize that if kids see a scuba diver in a tank, they want to see it. Not some boring sea cucumber. I did convince him to go off track and let the kids see the Nemo fish.

At one point we were climbing a spiral staircase when one of the kids tripped on the top step, falling hard to her knees in front of a parent with a toddler. She quickly got up, with no help from the other parent and followed our leader. As I was walking away I hear the mom said to her toddler, "See that girl? She wasn't watching where she was going and that is NOT good."

Whoa...what??!!? Seriously? That is what you tell your kid after another kid bails in front of you? I spun around and was ready to give it to the mom when I realized that she would probably just lecture her toddler on crazy people and frankly I felt bad enough for her kid that I decided to let it go...but just barely.

We ate lunch by the belugas, and went through the rainforest display. 12 five year olds imitating really loud blue parrots? Yeah. REALLY LOUD!!! Luckily the sloth didn't wake up. As we neared the end of the display, another parent and I commented to the teacher how amazing we thought she was for doing this every day, 6 hours a day. Her comment back was that she couldn't imagine doing this when she got old, like when she was 40.

Ummm??? Hello? I'm almost 40, or almost in my late thirties! So what are you sayin'? Yeah, I kinda wished I'd said something, but again, I was rising above. (Plus I thought it was really hilarious that she is so young that 40 is old!)

Made it back to the village with one kid asleep and 3 others is feisty moods. Lucky for me there was still an hour and a half of school left, so I threw the kids out of the van lovingly dropped the kids off and went for a coffee.

Another day of stellar parenting by yours truly.

The End

ps. There are no pictures of Bear because most of them included her classmates and I don't like to publish pictures of other people's kids unless they call me Auntie.