Here are some important facts from my part of the day (because, you know, the kids will get all the community service credit in the newspaper and all they had to do was show up):
- I got up at 5:00 AM and had Shane, Evie, and Fiona out the door by 6:00 AM. The last time we did this was in 2009 when we got the cats spayed.
- I drove my 12 passenger van to Tacoma, Puyallup, and Sumner. I navigated tricky roads and went around road blocks. I got stuck in parade float parking and had to ask the classic convertibles that carry princess to move out of my way. I parked illegally. I used Google Maps on my phone to figure out where I was and where I was supposed to meet the end of the parade.
- I listened to the conversations of boys. Topics covered included The Illuminati, trail mix, knock-knock jokes, who-can-be-quietest-the-longest (and can Blake be quiet at all?), male anatomy ("There are girls and women in this car, boys!"), singing of "99 Bottles of Pop on the Wall," and more Illuminati. They thought they could break me with the singing, but they failed to remember I have seven kids and blocking out annoying sounds is my specialty. They annoyed themselves long before I even twitched.
- I made a mental list of Good Boy Scouts and Bad Boy Scouts.
- The boys -who are all public schooled and are used to be separated by age (and still by gender for this age group) got a real life lesson in how to behave around younger girls and how their bad behavior can trickle down. The boys were walking along the benches and I told them to be respectful of where other people might sit just as Fiona decided to join the boys in the bench walking. The patrol leader, who was still nervous after the tongue-lashing he received for making anatomy jokes around my girls, immediately saw Fiona trying to copy them and lectured his troop mates on setting a good example for younger people.
- I spent the day with a friend I work really well with. She is a self-described OCD control freak. I'm happy to follow along with whatever her plans are and to not try to change them or give her my opinion on anything. In fact, I never had an opinion on anything, which was even better, because if I would have had an opinion and not stood up for myself, I would have annoyed her for not standing up for myself. I happily followed her down closed roads and back roads and completely trusted her to get us to where we needed to be. She is very good at planning out details and getting things rolling. She organized the whole parade experience for these kids. Things outside her control, like keeping preteen boys from devolving into chaos when they are supposed to be working, tend to break her. This is when my super power of managing with rowdy chaos around me kicks in. Having and homeschooling seven kids really helps develop this super power.
- We had 4000 daffodils to take off the float and put in vases after the three parades. Exactly six daffodils were (supposed to be) in each vase (I knew my friend wouldn't count flowers over my shoulder, so I just estimated). One boy wondered how many vases we would have to fill and couldn't reach his phone calculator to find out. I said, "You should be able to figure that out in your head. How many times does six go into 40? Six? No, we will need more than 600 vases, because there are still 400 flowers left. Six hundred and sixty-six." Big Eyes "The Illuminati!"
- When we delivered the flowers to the assisted living facility, I was able to witness the stripping of a boy's cocky attitude as he humbly approached his wheelchair-bound grandmother and gave her flowers. That might have been the highlight of my day.
- I dropped the boys off 14 hours after I picked them up. I put the van in park, turned around to the boys, and said, "GET OUT!" One of the Good Boy Scouts, who doesn't know me and is an only child, looked shocked and apologized for being annoying. I smiled and said, "Just kidding. I have seven kids. You guys were not annoying. Go find your rides and I'll see you later."
- I was originally going to have to bring all my kids to this event. But I decided to keep Ian at home with Daniel so I wouldn't have to deal with carsickness. And when Mark's trip to California got cancelled, I was able to leave Heidi and Lula with him. I am so glad I didn't have Lula and Heidi. They would have made the day so difficult. I left before they woke up and got home after they went to bed. I was gone for 15 1/2 hours.
- Ian's friends wanted to know why he didn't want to participate. His reasons were 1) He didn't want to get up that early and 2) waste a perfectly good video game day 3) marching in a parade with flowers.
