Emilia's preschool announced they were going on a field trip to the pumpkin patch. I thought that sounded like fun and volunteered to go along. Before I could interact with any of the children I had to do a mandatory, three hour, online training about sexual harassment, blood borne pathogens, bla bla bla bla bla...(keep in mind this was during the "Internet only at the library" phase of my life.)
The morning of the field trip, I showed up at the school and parked in the parking lot next to a telephone pole. I got out of the van and had the door open while i was gathering everything i would need for the day. All of a sudden I felt something wet hit my head. As I turned my head to see where it came from two things happened simultaneously. One, I saw a seagull perched on the telephone pole above me and two, the chunk of hair that was now saturated with bird droppings whipped across my face and stuck over my upper lip giving me a poopstache. If I wasn't so busy dry heaving, I may have been laughing. Thankfully, as always, I had wipes in the car and scrubbed my face and hair clean.
Heidi, Emilia and I got into the classroom only to find out that the pumpkin patch the preschool was going to was in Corvallis...53 miles away. They were strapping 23 pre-school children into the special needs bus (so they each had a seat belt) leaving no room for any supervisors except for one teacher. They wanted me to also strap Heidi into the bus with the pre school kids and ride with the other parent volunteers on the second bus with the high school kids. None of this was sounding like a good idea. Not to mention that Emilia gets car sick in the back of our van and I could only imagine what was going to happen on a bus.
Thankfully my friend Sara was also there and we ended up driving (with Heidi) in her van behind the bus. As a precaution, I warned the teacher that Emilia has a tendency to ralf in motor vehicles and I gave her a plastic bag...just in case. The bus was scheduled to leave at 8:30 am. We pulled out of the driveway at 9:40. We had followed the bus for literally one mile when the bus driver pulled over to the side of the road. We could see the teacher running around in the bus and then out the door with barfed on clothing in hand. I jumped out of the van with my trusty wipes and ran to help her out. Amazingly it wasn't Emilia that was barfing...it was some other poor kid.
We finally got there about 11:20, just in time to eat lunch. Emilia was being grumpy the whole time so I only got one picture of her smiling. Heidi thought it was great! They went down the slide and played in the corn bin. They got to ride on the tractor out to the pumpkin patch and choose a pumpkin to bring home. Of course they picked the biggest ones out there which made carrying Heidi and two pumpkins to the car quite the circus act. The greatest moment of the day was going on the cow train. Emilia could have stayed on there all day and been a very happy girl!
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