Field Trips

Among other places, I have been to the Butterfly house three times, the Weldon Springs radioactive materials storage site, Hannibal, MO, the St. Louis Symphony, the zoo, and a local park.

It's field trip season. I have mixed feelings about field trips. When the kids were younger, I dreaded the sheer energy drain involved in keeping track of elementary age kids. They always acted like they'd never been let out of a school before and had to make as much noise and touch as many things as possible before someone realized the mistake they'd made and put them back in their school cage.

As my children have grown, I've been more ambivalent. I've enjoyed quite a few field trips, but I'm still pleasantly surprised by this fact. I don't quite know why. Probably because I'm always there in the capacity of lion tamer, and I have to keep my eye on everything.

I do know my favorite part of every field trip, and its not the bus ride back. It's lunch. First, the kids are always starved by the time we sit down for lunch, so they are ecstatic. Second, I get to sit and talk with them. My kid always shows me off like a cool rock they found that they'll let their friends see if they're good.

They giggle and wiggle, and I get to just watch them being kids. The most supervision I have to do is making sure they throw away all their trash. I open yogurt containers and pull open chip bags. As we break bread, I look at the weird and wonderful things they bring in their lunches - all manner of lunchable type concoctions, yogurt that changes colors - and I store up what my kid is like at this age. That's the best part.

So wish me luck. Friday is a field trip. I'm packing a bologna sandwich, chips, and grapes.