Like Ducks in the Wind

Have you seen this video?  I first saw it as the "Play of the Day" on Good Morning America this week.  As you can see by the title, it shows a family of ducks crossing the highway in full traffic.  Take a look:

Yesterday I thought of the video and the tiny little ducklings being scattered by the wind of the passing cars, and thought - hey!  I've seen that in real life - at school this week!

It true.  I was the mother duck and the Little People were the blown-around ducklings. All because of Picture Day.

I have fussed about Picture Day before.  No matter how much we prepare, it always ends up as a crazy day.  However, we always just gear up as the day approaches and do our best to make it go smoothly.

One of the most precarious parts of the Picture Days in the past is that the Little People have had to stand and wait on the school stage until it was their turn to get their picture taken.  And as any preschool teacher can tell you: Little People + School Stage = Potential Trouble.

However, this year we arrived at the school commons area discover that the photographers had been given the cafeteria itself to work in, and all of the kids were eating outside.  This at first seemed to me to be an excellent idea.

However, I forgot that this new batch of Little People had never experienced Outside Lunch before.  They were unsure what we were doing, where we were going, and who all of those big kids were milling around the commons area.  Add to this several upper grade music and band students returning to their classroom and taking their lines precariously close to my little row of ducks Little People.  This was perhaps their first "blow by" on the highway, and they scattered a little bit, but managed to all arrive at our lunch table.

Now, if all we had to do was to make it to our lunch table, we would have been fine.  It would have been like a video of the duck family crossing a sidewalk with a few people walking by, or perhaps a bike.  However, we had to get to five different destinations:  to the lunch table to put our lunch boxes down, into the cafeteria for pictures, out of the cafeteria and back to our table, and from our table all the way to the playground.  Each destination had it's own traffic of class lines (beep!  beep!) and random elementary students (zoom!  zoom!).

The only time we really had trouble was on the way to the playground with two more band classes.    One Little Person started gazing around and blew into the midst of them - but fortunately they shooed her back over to us.

Finally, we staggered into the playground area.  We closed the gate behind us - and latched it.  I felt windblown, harried, and a little bit crazed as the Little People were finally able to run free.

But perhaps like that mother duck, I also felt a huge sense of accomplishment.  We did it - pictures were taken, lunches were eaten, our end destination was reached - successfully.

Picture Day

Source: weheartit.com via Kelly on Pinterest

I had to go back through the blog posts from last year to see if I wrote anything about Picture Day.  And I did not, except to describe how one Little Person was going to pose like a boxer for his picture.   In hindsight, it is quite amazing to me that Picture Day escaped with so little comment, because the truth is that Picture Day is crazy.  I mean almost out-of-control chaos.  It's a wonder that any preschoolers anywhere survive it. Or Preschool Teachers, for that matter.

To give you a better understanding of this traumatic event, let me just tell you all of the elements that must go together to make Picture Day.  First, you have the Picture Day setting:  Lunchtime.   Not only is lunchtime a noisy and distraction-filled time on any given day,  the combination of a noisy room, any kind of food and 21 dressed up, curled up and/or slicked down Little People is generally not a good one. 

Then you mix in the fact that everyone in the school is getting their picture taken, so despite your best wishes, the Little People must actually start eating their lunches before it is their turn.  (See point above.) We can only be thankful that there was no chili or ketchup on the menu that day.

Then you add in the fact that  the actual pictures are taken on the stage of the cafeteria.    The stage with a four-foot drop off that naturally serves as a magnet for any three or four year old.  Plus a live microphone, which my aide wrenched out of Little Johnny's hand just in time before he gave his own personal broadcast to all of the upper elementary grades.

In addition to the elements already mentioned, you also have  one grouchy Picture man in a very deceptively happy-looking Hawaiian shirt.  I'm not sure if he just didn't like preschoolers or was just feeling resentful to allchildren needing their pictures taken.  (Which would be sadly ironic, since that was obviously his job.)    Either way, he wasn't very friendly, nor was he the least bit accommodating to our Little People.   In fact, even though he had his own photography station that he had been using before we got up there, he didn't even take pictures while my kids were up on the stage.  This left them to wait through just two photographers.  Then he came to me and said I would need to line all my remaining kids up behind just one of the photographers so the bigger kids could come to the other two cameras.  I furrowed my brow at him and asked as sweetly as I could, "Or perhaps could they just stay with the two photographers they're at now so they can get done quicker -- because they're  four."  He said huffily, "I know they're four," but he didn't make me move them.  And obviously he didn't really know that  which he said he knew, because anyone who really knows that knows that you don't try to line up a class of preschoolers on a stage with a four foot drop just feet away from them.   In fact, the words "line up" and "wait" don't even go together in Four Year Old world.  I definitely don't think he knew that.

Finally, the final part of this is that fact that the three teachers also have to get their pictures taken.  We just took turns after we finally got everyone back to their seat (where they were too distracted to eat any more and were largely just either yelling as loudly as they could or were flinging their lunch boxes around wildly at their neighbors).  I tried to wipe the sheen of sweat and Picture Day stress off of my face before they took my picture, but I'm not sure it worked.

I think I just looked Harried.  Which I suppose captured the entire experience perfectly.