Field trip
Yesterday I went on a field trip with D’s preschool class. Thousands of parents do it every day, but it was a big deal for me. As a working mother married to a stay-at-home dad, it’s hard to justify taking off from work in order to volunteer at the preschool. It’s a half-day preschool, and they typically have class parties and family snack in the middle of the day, so in addition to whatever time I spent at school, I’d lose another hour and a half to commuting. So I usually let my husband pass out the muffins, even if I was the one to bake them. It’s a bit strange, because if we both worked in offices, I’d be eager to take my share of mornings off.
But that means there’s a whole part of D’s life that I’m totally not a part of. It’s better this year than last, when he was so nonverbal that the only way we knew what he had done in school was the crafts stuffed into his backpack, but I still feel like I’m missing out. So when they asked for volunteers to go to a nature center with the kids, I checked my work calendar (December is usually fairly quiet), put in for leave, and signed up.
As it turned out, yesterday was a lousy day for me to be out of the office in the morning. Somehow, even though Thompson announced his resignation two weeks ago, it didn’t occur to the powers that be that we’d have to pull together a briefing book for the new Secretary, whoever it might be, and maybe they didn’t have to wait until the nomination was announced to think about the format etc. So we’ve been scrambling all week. This sort of urgent flailing is among my least favorite parts of my job, but I felt bad dumping it on my coworkers. Fortunately I’m not high up enough to get issued a blackberry, so no one could send me drafts to review en route.
I was bizarrely nervous about the field trip — worried that I’d get into a car accident driving the kids or something. It was fine, of course. It was freezing cold, so they stayed inside the center, but got to see a puppet show about how animals deal with the winter, see a live frog and turtles, etc. No one got lost, and the only blood that was shed was mine. (D jumped onto my lap and smacked his skull into my mouth, bloodying my lip.) Everyone seemed to have a good time.
