buses, brats and bogs

• By Alison
• 4 February, 2010
• 8 Comments

I had the immeasurably pleasurable experience today of accompanying 32 seven and eight year olds on a school excursion to examine rocks and soil.

I say immeasurable, because there really is no scale that can accurately rate the level of enjoyment versus panic that a trip like this can induce.

Miss Trouble Pants always wants me to go on the school trip with her. She’s still young enough to think I am cool. I know that won’t always be the case, but I revel in it while it’s offered.

The instructions for the day were to wear old jeans or trousers that can get dirty, with the school shirt and jumper on top. Wellington boots were to be brought along too.

As a parent helper, I presumed that the same requirements were going to prevail (with the exclusion of the school uniform part, that might be a bit kinky) so I dressed down accordingly, and turned up at the school gate. There were three classes going to the same place, and the parents for each class gathered in the staff room to wait for the buses. 

Our bus arrived nice and early – first one on the scene, and promptly broke down outside the school. With one bus in front of the school, there was now no room for any other buses to get through and so the other classes had to walk down to the main road to get onto theirs.

We waited for ours to get started. Then we waited for it to get fixed. And then we waited for a new one to come. From Millwall. 

The staffroom was stifling – we’d all dressed for outside in the freezing drizzle, so eventually we all had to strip down to the lowest layer with our piles of outer swathing on the floor. In all, we ended up waiting an hour. But an hour in a boiling staffroom was heaven compared to a room with 32 stir crazy children who were expecting fun and excitement.

Eventually we were on the bus and on our way.

As the mother of two girls, I am very naive in the way of boys. To me, normal boy behaviour seems to be misbehaving. I never quite know whether a game is normal boy fun, or a fight. Like that game where boys try and kick another boy’s legs out from under him. Now to me – that’s being naughty! But apparently to boy mothers it’s perfectly acceptable.

So I am the tyrant mother who is always bossing the kids about. The nagging one. I think they hate me. They also ignore me, so there isn’t too much harm done. I get the feeling that I am not supposed to slap them about either. How unfair is that? There are some kids that could really do with a good slap up the backside of the head!

Luckily buses these days have seatbelts, because that limits the scope of misbehaviour! It doesn’t do anything for the noise though.

Because we were an hour late, we had to rush through the first few things, which was analysing rocks for their qualities. As there wasn’t a huge amount of scope for getting dirty, some of the boys under my care had to resort to rubbing the rocks on their faces to try and get some filth on. This is something my girls would never think of! It’s almost as if they had a reputation of dirt to protect!

The centre had a good playground to let the kids burn a few engery bars down. The boys ran off in the direction of a football, and the girls played some intricate game of it in the corner.

I hid in the opposite corner, sucking down coffee from my flask. It was blissful for about 5 minutes – until the first casualty of the day. And guess who – of course, my daughter is face down in the woodchips, having fallen off a log face first.

She’s spitting out dirt – must be taking the topic of the trip very seriously! But underneath the muck there are no grazes and no blood, so the only real injury is to pride.

The next part of the day is painting with dirt. Yep – dirt mixed up with water to make mud. They all drew three trees with pencil, then use brushes to paint the dirt over the top. They painted with chalky, sandy, and loamy dirts, which make three distinctly different shades of brown. I was quite impressed with the results. 

Then came the muddy part of the day – a walk up to the local church with is built from flint and sandstone. It wasn’t as muddy as I feared it might be fortunately! Because we were so late we had to skip a few other mucky activities, including “mud rolling” in order to leave in time to make it back to school.

Just before we board the bus to come back to school the kids run around like crazy for 5 minutes. That’s all it takes for the second casualty of the day to occur. And it’s my daughter again. I was washing my hands when someone came to tell me she’d fallen over, and I laughed and casually finished drying before I went out to check on her. But then I looked out the open door and saw then entire class including all the adults crowding around her as she lay prone on the ashphalt. Shit! I abandoned the drying and ran out feeling guilty.

She was fine though, she had a graze and probably a bruise on her butt, but it was probably mostly shock at the time. Her legs slipped out from under her and she’d hit the ground hard just below her hip. Her pride however was ever further dented, and she just wanted to sit with me on the bus on the way home. She was crying as we got on because her teacher pairs them off rather than letting them choose their own seat mates.

He’s a very smart man though – he manipulated the kids in front so that she had no partner, and then apologised that to her that she’d have to sit with an adult. Which was me. 

So we got to sit together and chat all the way home without her being embarrassed.

There won’t be too many more moments where I can take an active part in her school life – let alone her want me to be there, so I love the chances I get.

And I am glad we missed out on the mud rolling.

* Picture credit: It’s the cover of a book called “The School Trip” by Nick Butterworth and Mick Inkpen, both of whom have been perennial favourites of my girls!