Winter Olympics

Okay, I guess I have recovered from the Winter Olympics.

The kids' school had a Winter Olympic Games at a local skating rink. The whole school had a field trip at the same time.

We will now have a short pause while all the parents who read this blog go off to fetch an Excedrin and a cold pack at the idea of an entire grammar school having a field trip at the same time in the same place.

Somehow in the sweep of events I found myself volunteering to go along as a chaperone. I got a little book all printed up about the Olympic Games. The children are broken up into groups of 6 and will be wearing colored name tags with their group number on them, each group has 2 parents to keep track of the kids and the groups will cycle through the games, fifteen minutes per game with periodic breaks for food and potty breaks and so on. An entirely different group of parents is equipped with plastic bags and extra clothing and is assigned to do nothing but take little kids to the bathroom and change them if they don't make it as necessary. Another group of parents is assigned to man the tunnel which goes from the figure skating rink (where the little kids go) to the larger racing rink where the big kids go.

I was assigned to run the "slalom" game on the ice (game number 5, byt the way, lol). This means you set up eight little cones and the kids skate between them, you know, like in a bike rodeo but then on skates.

I was dumbstruck at the amazing organization of this Plan. It was a work of art.

Well. Except. These kids are between 4 and 6 years old. The canals have not frozen solid enough to skate on in the past 2 years, so they have never been on ice unless it was at a skating rink. So. First was the acqusition of rental skates for everybody who didn't have any. This task was assigned to the group parents, the rest of us were suppsoed to be drinking coffee. But the call for "all hands on deck" went out and we all went trooping over to locate and put on ice skates (Tommy, Stein, stop playing swordfights with the skate blades, those are sharp. Siep, put your coat back on. Nanneke, darling, I love your ice skates with the little princesses on them but it isn't necessary to kick Hanneke to show them to me. /& repeat)

Then half the kids went on the ice and half the kids went to play organized games off the ice (three hours on ice is a long time when you are 4 to 6). The kids off the ice decided the games were boring and wandered over to the ice to watch. The kids on the ice mostly couldn't ice skate so the idea of slaloming was a non-starter. It's hard to slalom on your butt).

Within ten minutes the Plan was in shambles. So everybody regrouped, the Game parents were assigned to cruise around and teach kids to stand up on ice skates. Meanwhile Douwe and Daan got up a good game of bumper cars with the other kids who could already skate or who had double bladed skates with the little cage thingies they have to help starting skaters.

It went on like that. It was fun. Chaotic but fun.