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.