I know that this is going to be controversial (sorry Jo Rae) and I have nothing specifically against the Boy Scouts (well maybe just a skosh, but this isn't that type of blog). Today in the cafeteria, the Boy Scouts did what they aimed to do. They got their flyers out, they got the kids REALLY excited about the concept of scouting, and I guarantee that hundreds of kids will go home and tell their parents about the meeting Thursday night in the cafeteria. I'm sure that the Boy Scouts will get lots of new recruits. The only problem was that this little speech and all the flyers with cool pictures on it got the kids worked up into a near frenzy. Instead of eating their lunches, they were all shouting about whether or not they were going to join the Boy Scouts. It also left them with all kinds of questions. Instead of fielding my usual questions such as "Can I have a spork?" and "Am I allowed to put ketchup on my pickles?" I was faced with burning questions about Boy Scouts which I was ill prepared to answer.
The following is a list of my favorites:
"Do you have to get bit by a black widow spider in order to join?"
"Is there scuba diving involved?"
"If it is over night, can I bring my mommy?"
"Will we get to race elephants?"
and my all time favorite, "Can we go to this boy scout thing instead of going to school everyday?"
The boys were lost in their fantasies about all the adventures they were going to have as boy scouts and the girls were looking at each other in a confused sort of way, like, what gives? During this time of hand raising and general loudness, the one thing I did not see a whole lot of was eating. I know that I am paranoid about this kind of thing. My kids have slight frames and they get on the bus at 9 and off the bus at 4:20. This is a long time and I just worry that during the measily 25 minutes that they have to eat their lunch (at least 10 of these minutes is wasted on getting seated, chatting, and opening things) a seemingly innocuous speech about boy scouting can really throw the whole thing off. Both of my kids came home with nearly full lunch boxes and in bad moods.
In addition to the added mayhem and the lack of eating, I felt kind of badly for the girls. They came away from the whole experience a bit confused to say the least. Well, what about us? We want to learn about snake venom and eat marsh mallows the size of our heads around the campfire until the wee hours of the night, too! The speaker did say something a kin to (and I'm paraphrasing here) Girl Scouts did fun things like that, too, but today we are talking abut the Boy Scouts. I'm not sure if there is a similar thing scheduled for the Girl Scouts but I suspect that there isn't. In the spirit of fairness, I think there should be but I hope I know about it in advance so I can make sure that I'm not on the schedule for lunch buddy duty that day!
