About a year ago, my middle son joined the cub scouts. My husband took him to most of the meetings and apparently on the first night they passed around a form and had all of the parents sign up to do a den meeting. My husband signed me up for April's den meeting. The theme was "Spring Into Action". By the way, if you want to make a year go by REALLY fast, get your husband to sign you up for something that you really don't want to do.
So tonight was the big "Spring Into Action" den meeting. I worried about this meeting for an entire year. A week and a half ago I began preparations for the meeting. I wanted this meeting to be great. If I'm going to do something, I never go at it half-ass. So I trek on over to the Boy Scout store and buy one of their books that gives suggestions for things to do at the meeting. I spent several days scouring the internet and putting together an outline of the events I had planned for the meeting. The outline was written and rewritten several times. I wanted to make sure everything flowed just right.
The plan was that I would put in all the preparations for the meeting and my husband would actually run the meeting with help from me. I planned a cute little lesson involving the various meaning of the word spring and then got into the history of the development of the Slinky toy and various lessons we can learn from the inventor of the Slinky.
I planned fun events like an Inchworm Race, a Egg & Spoon Race, a Balloon Stampede, and a Marshmallow Kick, Throw & Blow Event. After each event I would hand out little ribbons for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place then at the end of all of the events, everyone would get a ribbon for participating.
I planned to make little pinecone bird feeders and even was thoughtful enough (I thought) to buy $5 a jar sunflower butter just in case there was anyone there with a peanut allergy. I handled absolutely every detail.
I bought 4 boxes of Kool Aid pouch drinks for 11 kids, just to make sure that I had plenty. I even went so far as to freeze the drinks the night before so they would be nice and slushy and super cold for them.
This morning my husband says he doesn't feel well. Great. I'm thinking, he won't do the meeting after all of this, I'm going to have to do the whole thing myself. I gave him a copy of the outline of the meeting this morning and the only thing he had to do all day was to read over it and get prepared to run the meeting. We get there and unpack our van load of stuff and he starts messing up the meeting right from the get-go. He has absolutely no idea what we are doing. I cannot believe that I have gone through all of this preparation, gathering of supplies, planning every single minute detail and he can't even read over an outline and do the meeting!
Long story kinda short, I end up doing the whole thing myself. Kids were running all around like lunatics not even listening to hardly anything I had to say and to top it all off this one kid kept coming up to me and lying and saying that he was 3rd in EVERY SINGLE EVENT even though I clearly saw that he was not 1st, 2nd or 3rd every single time. I wanted to tell him, "Now son, you're darn lucky that you weren't born 30 years ago because if you had been I'd spank you right here for lying to me and your mom wouldn't even care!" Back when I grew up adults made their kids mind and everyone else's kids too. There was none of this running all around not listening to adults. At least not that I can remember. We were too scared of getting in trouble.
So now I'm absolutely exhausted and glad that the whole thing is finally over. I have a brand new admiration for teachers who have to keep order with 20 or 30 kids on a daily basis. I only had 11 and I thought I would pull my hair out!
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