jury box or jump house?

so today . . . i was surrounded by super heroes and princesses. tiny ones... yes, it's halloween again.

halloween is not my favorite holiday for many, many reasons, but one of the main ones is tiny children coming to school in costume. i know, i know, i sound like the halloween scrooge, but tiny children in costumes result in cranky teacher miss julie. partly because tiny children in costumes tend to be very rambunctious (not necessarily a good thing when there are a gazillion of them in a classroom--at least it sure seems like a gazillion,) and partly because it means it is harvest festival day...

harvest festival day is second only to sports day on my list of most miserable school days, with picture day running a close third... but those are blogs for another day. today was harvest festival day...

here's how it works. first, most of the children come to school in costumes--costumes with numerous parts to them. there are tiaras and swords and helmets and magic wands and pompoms and cowboy hats. none of these things are easy or comfortable for the children to wear, but they are part of the costume. and so, while they want to wear them, all that stuff just gets in their way. but they want to wear it! so they wear it for a while. and then about the time we get outside and get involved in the activities, they decide they don't want to wear it anymore. and guess what happens then???

and then there are the activities. usually there are five or six different stations, and we have a schedule. each class spends about 20 minutes at each station. which would be fine, except the picture taking station only takes about five minutes, and the kids would stay at the jumper station all morning! and while the face painting station only takes a few minutes for each child, it can easily take 20 minutes to paint the faces of a whole class. which means getting your face painted for 3 minutes and sitting and waiting for everyone else for the next 17 minutes. if we are lucky. because it is halloween! and they are in costume!! no one is going to sit for 17 minutes, waiting patiently for their friends to get their faces painted. and so it is a constant juggling act between hurrying to get done at some stations before our time is up, and keeping a class full of four and five year olds occupied at other stations with nothing to do... let's just say, we sang every song i could think of... some of them twice...

and this year we had the added bonus of fishing--for real, live goldfish. the kids loved it! i am not so sure their parents are going to love it. because assuming that the fish lives until the end of the school day, those parents are going to have to make a stop on the way home to get a fish bowl, fish food, and colored rocks (because you cannot have a fish bowl without colored rocks! and who knows how long it will take them to choose the perfect color!!) on a day when they need to get right home and get ready for trick or treating. and then, before they get home, that fish will have a name. and then, tomorrow morning, the fish will be dead...

call me a pessimist, but it's the truth.

sleeping beauty's plastic jewels kept coming apart. the sequins on the cheerleader's dress were blinding everyone in the sunshine. spiderman didn't want to go to the bathroom, because he would have to take his costume off for a few minutes. spider girl (who even knew there was such a thing! but there she was in all her pink, tulle glory,) informed me she was not spider girl! she was afraid of spiders, so she was the black widow--even though there wasn't a spot of black on her costume, and she had no idea what a widow was. and when i tried to tell her that a black widow was a kind of spider (because i'd left my brain in bed this morning,) she started to cry. normally i am immune to crying, but she was working her way up to a full blown melt down, and it was harvest festival day, so i did the only thing i could do--i agreed with her erroneous 4 1/2 year old thinking. fine. you want to be the black widow, which is not a spider? fine. just stop crying...

i'm so ashamed...

and then there was the child who didn't wear a costume, telling the cheerleader in the sparkly dress "your costume is ugly!" as the cheerleader's dad came into the classroom to tell his darling daughter "have a nice day..." and the cute little girl who i thought was dressed as a cowgirl, only to find out (after i had complimented her on her costume,) that she wasn't wearing a costume. and the boy in my class who is consumed by angry birds mania, but wouldn't wear the bird costume for the picture, because it was blue. because, as everyone knows, the cool bird is the red one!

and then, again, there was spiderman... spiderman is my wild child this year. we try to keep one of our eyes on him all the time, because he is fast, he is impulsive, and we never know what he is going to do next. but today, in his spiderman suit, he was much calmer. i don't know if it is because the suit was somewhat restrictive when he tried to move (meaning almost too small,) or if it came with special spidey powers, but i am thinking of asking his mom if he can wear the suit every day...

i thought i might miss the harvest festival this year. i am scheduled for jury duty this week, so you know, there was a possibility... i don't think i have ever wished that my number would get called for jury duty before, but this year, a nice quiet day in the waiting room at the courthouse, reading my book sounded like a lovely alternative to the somewhat chaotic (and this year, HOT) harvest festival. i even did my jury orientation online over the weekend so that if i was called, i could sleep in just a bit on the first day. but today was not my first day. and tomorrow won't be either. so now i am back to hoping that they don't call my number for jury duty...

...unless they could do it on picture day ;-)