TEAMWORK

The spring soccer coaches had a meeting tonight that overlapped our rescheduled Den meeting (due to bad storms earlier this week), so I took both kids, armed with balloons and instructions from Jay to play "Team Building Games". First up was a game where we all stood in a circle, holding hands, and used only our legs to keep a balloon (or two or three) afloat. So much easier on paper... and probably would have been easier with any group other than 7 rowdy First Grade boys and 1 little sister... Pretty sure it took us 20 minutes to keep a single balloon up for at least 20 seconds. It was fun though, and I earned some credit with the kids for squealing and lunging along with them. The second game was called "Monster" and had the simple instructions to have the boys create a monster using one less arm and one more leg than the number of boys making up the monster. The Den leader and I started at each other blankly. A dad came over and scratched his chin. I literally started picking up boys and moving them around and piling them, trying to come up with something... Then, thankfully, Jean Luc's older sister walked over and told us to just try having 3 boys link arms and carry 2 boys wheelbarrow style. Genius. It still took quite a few attempts to get them to walk 20 steps as a "monster" and roar, not to mention switching out kids so EVERYONE had a turn at being a wheelbarrow, but we got it done. Thank goodness for big sisters with good ideas!

(Ms. Kerry, in the stripes, is largely pregnant and overdue - she was a trooper tonight!)

We ended the meeting with safety lessons about emergency situations and how/when to call 911. I learned some details about other parents that they probably wish their boys hadn't shared, but I also learned that our kids do NOT know our address or cell phone numbers (I really thought they knew, but apparently they just know how to give directions around town via north/south and street names, and not their actual home address...) So, when we got home I pulled out the writing paper and had them each write our address and my cell phone number 10 times, and then we practiced swiping mama's locked phone to find the Emergency call button. All in all, a productive evening.