Field Day

In honor of Covid-19 ruining the best parts of the Spring (and Summer, and probably Fall, and all of 2020) I have decided to revive the blog and write about the thing that Covid has destroyed that honestly cannot be forgiven at this point. No, I'm not talking about Prom. I'm not talking about graduation. I'm talking about elementary school field day. So here are the highlights of that day from when I was a kid, because aside from this year having to be a virtual field day, they have changed exactly zero.


Opening Ceremonies
First things first, we are going to need some Pomp, and we are going to need a whole heck of a lot of Circumstance. Literally that song will need to play on repeat as each class marches outside in militant formation and flawlessly aligns in the parking lot. We will have rehearsed this never, yet we pull this off perfectly.

There is exactly one reason why this goes off without a hitch - our teachers will have threatened to take away the snow cone party at the end of field day if we screw this up for them, and every single one of us knows they are as serious as a heart attack about it. The last child will exit the building specifically on the last note of the song, military precision, and then some child will sing the Star Spangled Banner while wearing the school mascot costume. This will be hilarious to all of us and none of us will laugh, again, due to aforementioned risk of snow cone party removal.

Themes
Field days are themed. The theme is patriotism. Your class will not get to be America. Honestly, the most annoying class in the world somehow "drew from a hat" getting to be America and they will reallllly rub it in. And their class mom will go out and buy them all like Team USA olympic tear away windsuits or something absurd and your class is left making Djibouti tie dye t-shirts and you don't even care because you get INTO IT. You are team Djibouti. Did you know Djibouti speaks mostly French and Arabic and has volcanos? GO BLUE AND GREEN!

Competition

The premise of field day is "Let's prove how many different ways Ainsley can lose at something". But, like a goldfish with a 12 second memory span, I would float from station to station and be fully convinced I was going to be bringing home the GOLD in this newest challenge. Oh, shot put? FOR SURE  going to beat every single kid in my 2nd grade class at throwing a ball denser than the sun a thousand yards. It's irrelevant that I was specifically put at 1st base on my softball team for the explicit purpose that 1st basemen rarely have to throw the ball, and that is truly the only position on the field that has that unique feature. I'm a throwing master now. Let's rage.

Closing Ceremonies

Jamie Savinski beat everyone every year. She was amazingly fast, and was better at everything than even the boys. Also she was my best friend up until like 4th grade so even though I literally never won, I kind of won vicariously through her. Her reward was that she got to get her snow cone first. I mean, what a treasure. Also this was the moment that being the class from Djibouti with the tie dye t-shirts paid off. Well well well Team America, looks like your wind suits all got stained and ruined with snow cone juice, and our shirts just got more tie dyed. BOOM. MIC DROP.

The Scholastic Book Fair

I got the "opportunity" today to go help my kindergartner's class pick out their top eight books from the scholastic book fair for their wish list. This book fair was my JAM when I was a kid. I mean, out of my top 10 memories as a kid, Book Fair is on the list at least 3 separate times.

Supermarket Sweep
Can someone PLEASE explain to me why we were given exactly twelve minutes to get our brains around ten-thousand book options?? This was not easy for a 7 year old. We had $14 in random bills and loose change, and we had to keep a running tally of our planned purchases in our head like a bookie at the tracks on race day... it was unnecessary chaos. But honestly something about that experience being almost exactly like the game show Supermarket Sweep, where middle-aged woman skidded through the grocery store throwing frozen 20-pound turkeys in their buggy, made the experience of book shopping on the fly all the sweeter. They could have given us more time. But then, perhaps, the magic would die off.

Extortion
News Flash - the Scholastic Book Fair has not remained immune to inflation, and the prices are still at "Price Level-Extortion". I pointed to one of the few books for my 5 year old that wasn't Barbie or Shopkins themed as a suggestion. "Hey look at this book! This is about a girl SCIENTIST!!!". My forced enthusiasm was matched, and my child willingly handed me her list to fill in the details. The details for the EIGHTEEN DOLLAR BOOK. In no way. I'm a scientist. Just talk to me about that stuff for free. #budget

I remember being so ready to turn into a bookworm every book fair. I made promises to myself that I would read my face off, and all the purchases I was definitely making were just investments in my new-found personality. It was like a New Years Resolution for a 2nd grader. Naturally I, along with all of the rest of my classmates, waltzed up to the check out hoping for some type of math-miracle. Maybe there's a book coupon I didn't know about. Maybe that JFK 50 cent coin my dad gave me out of his weird coin bucket he keeps on his desk is worth it's weight in gold.

My mother was OF COURSE working the PTA check out line and was not interested in my attempt at acquiring $150 of Goosebumps. The slow walk to put away all but 3 books was the worst. Just thinking about other kids getting to enjoy the book you tried to read. I hope you loved that Animorphs where the girl turned into the wolf. Because I can't read those, they are "evil" and also $12 in 1996.

Pitch Meeting

Turns out the Book Fair is also full of land mines. And by land mines I mean, random toys. My kid asked about the toys today and I told her they weren't for sale they were for decoration. The concept of the book fair is astonishing; before book fairs existed, what was that concept pitch meeting like??

Idea Guy: OK. We are going to sell books to kids.

Business man: Great, like door to door?

I: No no no. In their school library.

B: You mean... where they have thousands of free books already at their disposal?

I: Well, yea, but this will be different! This will be like a fair.

B: Sure, ok, we will make books fun! We will have rides and carnival prizes and books.

I: Wrong. We will have nothing that is even remotely like a fair. We will have books on shelves. But the books will be turned ninety degrees sideways so the kids can see the covers instead of the spines.

B: Hmmm. So no games at all. Just racks of books they can buy in a room already full to the brim with free racks of books.

I: Exactly.

B: ok. So how do we make money off this?

I: I'll tell you how. We hype this up like the 2nd coming. We set a time limit so kids have a false sense of urgency, that if they don't buy that Fancy Nancy book here fore 1.5x the price it is anywhere else, they will never see Fancy Nancy again.

B: OK. I can see how that will work on the kids. But won't the parents see right through that gimmick?

I: YOU SEE NOTHING. The parents are not allowed to come make the purchases. Only kids can buy books.

B: With what money exactly?

I: The money their parents give them, of course.

B: I'm not following. Parents are going to BLINDLY give their kids an indeterminate amount of money to go buy books unsupervised?

I:  No no no. Well. Actually yes. But the parents will think it is regulated?

B: Gotcha.... how will they think that?

I: The kids will bring home a decoy "wish list". It will have tons of great reading books they "want" to buy. The parents will have to give their children the money and trust that their 6 year old will be a good steward of the funds.

B: This is making sense now. So we will just let the parents order the books and the kids are the middle men.

I: You could not be more wrong. The list is a decoy. The kids can buy whatever they want and since we time limit the event, the teachers can't police all 20 kids at once.

B: So what will they buy?

I: Posters. Toys. Erasers. And 1 book.

B: I see this working once. Won't parents get wise after the first time.

I: They literally will do this every year for centuries to come and never catch on.

B: This is a gold mine.

Childhood At Its Finest

Ok, so I have written several posts now about how awesome childhood was. Maybe it’s excessive. Or maybe it was a super fun time to reflect on, and I can find more material from my childhood than writing a blog titled “I Went To The Dentist Today and I Miraculously Have No Cavities But My Gums Are Throbbing And I Have To Pick Up Groceries: A Mini-series”. 

So instead, I’m going to jump into some more amazing things

that only childhood brings 

(and I HOPE TO GOD you read that the way Dr. Seuss intends for all accidental rhymes to be read).

Books

Kids books were straight up adventures from start to finish and I was hooked. I’m still, to this day, waiting for someone to blow my mind the way Amelia Bedelia did circa 1992. Am I the only one who remembers the racially-insensitive-but-it-was-a-different-time lore of Ricky Tikki Timbo NoSarRembo Charry Berry Rucci Pip Perry Pimbo? He fell down a well and his piss poor excuses for parents didn’t believe their accidental 2^nd child, Dave, when he told them. The 2^nd kid wasn’t called Dave but it was a name that equally conveyed “You’re not our favorite”. That book was a straight up Pandora’s Box of life lessons. 

**Every part of that story is based only on my memory. Some facts may be wrong- like for example the name of the actual book when I Googled it**

You know what fed our book bloodlust like no other? A scholastic book fair. What a wonderland. My mom always worked these because she was so high up in PTA she has a lifetime achievement lapel pin-swear to God. So she was the PTA Czar or whatever, and she was in charge of making sure I didn’t fool myself into thinking my family had recently won some kind of 5 figure scratch off and we could just buy all the books. What a time to be alive. Now all books are just ghosts of excitement. Even ones with twists and turns I feel like I just can’t emotionally commit to any character the way I committed to the Sweet Valley High Twins.

Dance Routines

If there was ever a time I didn’t pick up on social cues, it was during any of my at home dance performances. Bless my parents. They would always watch with fake excitement as I did some unidentifiable skill and waited for approval. How did they do it so dead pan? Or did they? I’m sure they laughed watching me do my choreographed interpretive exercise trampoline dance to Hansen’s MMMBOP with my friend Kelly. And I’m sure I was so convinced that I was amazing that I wouldn’t have even known the laughter was a more of an at-you than with-you kind. 

For all I knew they were laughing from sheer delight at having such a skilled and talented performer in the family. And to prove it, they video taped them all. Which I was sure was to mail in to some kind of trampoline-dance troupe, not to save and show me as I pee-cried on the floor laughing as an adult.

Optimism

Every moment is an opportunity when you’re 4. Literally, 30 seconds have gone by, as far as any 4 year old is concerned, now’s the time to ask if you can have bubble gum again. EVERYTHING COULD HAVE CHANGED IN THE LAST 30 SECONDS YOU DON’T KNOW!!!!

School is starting back. Do you know what that means? This is the time where each kid in class gets to bring in like 5 things that represent them. I was legitimately interested and fascinated by every single item that every single person brought in. It was like the day of 120 surprises, even though 12 of them were the troll dolls that sit on the top of the pencil with the eraser up their butts and at least 2 of them were seriously the gravel rocks from the bus driveway that hadn’t been paved and quite frankly at this point wasn’t going to get paved. Every item was a full blown journey into someone’s entire existence. If kids could freely use exclamation points when they felt like it they would break that key on the keyboard due to genuine overuse.

Now, a coworker has a baby and I wonder how many varieties of excitement phrases I can say at each indistinguishable picture. To be clear, I’ve transitioned from getting jacked about a tattered princess Diana limited edition but everyone legit had it Beanie Baby to having someone I personally know create life and I’m wondering what the social limit is on time-sharing this joy with them. Like 2 minutes? And then I swing back by 30 minutes later for a follow up comment to make them think I was thinking about it for the last 30 minutes?

Jumping

On/Off/Into/Over everything. We were human prepositional phrases. I actually would get blood blisters on my toes because I couldn’t stop running off the diving board and landing in the pool for 50 minutes every hour. Trampolines for DAYZ. Skip it?!?! I loved my skip it so much that when I accidentally slammed it into the garage door on a particularly risky skip and broke it my mom drove me straight to the store to get another. And we were not the family that does that. 

Jumping was the straight up easiest too. Now I do jump rope at the gym for 45 seconds and I start dry heaving. Which honestly there should be a trash can over there though you guys, there’s a billion trash cans in this gym, none in the jump rope area? You haven’t even slightly been on the wrong end of that plan yet?

All in all, being a kid was the straight up best. If I could use time travel for 1 thing it would be to travel back in time and get to be a kid again for like a week- as a vacation from being an adult. Or to go back and stop Hitler but OK that’s everyone’s answer I don’t even think that’s reasonable like it took ½ the world to stop him can I please just be 7 without judgement on this answer.

Me as a Trash Panda

Aside from Dolly, my black baby panther that is secretly me reincarnated come back to love me in the most unconditional way and make me emotionally codependent on a 7 pound feline, there's no other animal that gets me more than a raccoon. And that is the last time I will call them that, because we all know they are actually just trash pandas.

Me when skinny people say they don’t diet or exercise



Me trying to decide if I should get a side of cheese dip at Willys


Me the day after I get my highlights and they haven’t leveled out yet


What I wake up to at 6:30 on Saturday mornings from a 4 year old


My husband when I am about to say something like “Snitches get stitches” to the kids to teach them a life lesson about tattle telling


Me when I’ve said something a little too honest to my friend about how her outfit looks and now I feel badly

Me when I’m trying to be culturally sensitive about a topic I know nothing about


Me when at that point I just can’t even anymore


The result of me saying “I’m going to wing it”

Me when I’m left in charge of more than 3 children at 1 time

Me when the doorbell rings and it’s the Thai delivery

Me when I check my bank account balance after I’ve paid all the bills

Me having to be nice to people I don’t like

Me when someone tries to touch my face or hair

Me in every picture where I am forced to smile

Me when I think I've picked up the last toy and come around the corner to see the den has been made a disaster again

Literally just me. All the time.