Field trips and the working Mom



Sarah with her bear

As a working mom, your kid's field trips are always cause for concern, because you KNOW that you can't possibly go on all of them, or maybe even any of them.  There are only so many vacation days that you can take off, and you know that you will need to save some of those for when your kids get sick.  At my last workplace, there was no such thing as sick time, or vacation time; it was all lumped together under Paid Time Off days, or PTO for short. After working there for 5 years,  I had 13 PTO days, and that was it.  So when a field trip came up, my kids would always want me to come along with their class.  Most of the time, I couldn't.  I would hear tales of the museam, or the pumpkin patch, or the play, and always feel guilty that I was at work doing things like spending 2 hours in a meeting debating a shade of purple for next year's color palate.  Yikes.  Was this what I was supposed to be doing with my life?

But now as a stay at home Mom, I have been able to go on every field trip in the past year.  I have been to the strawberry patch, to the play in downtown Charlotte, and to Build a Bear today.  My youngest daughter got picked out of the lottery to attend a charter school for kindergarden.  Charter schools are public schools, but they pick kids randomly by a lottery to attend.  Most Moms in my area put their kids in the lottery every year for these charter schools, since the regular public schools are so overcrowded.  I have put my kids into the lottery for YEARS and had no luck getting picked.  Until last year when I entered child #3, Sarah, into the lottery for Kindergarden.  A few months after losing my job, I found out she had gotten in. 



The class lining up to stuff the bears

At this particular school, they require students to do community service project hours.  So the kindergardeners take a field trip to Build a Bear at the mall.  There they all make a bear, and then give them away to children in the hospitals.  Build a Bear did an awesome job of keeping the kids interested in picking out the bears, stuffing the bears, and decorating the bears with a bow or two.  When you have around 20 five year olds, that can be a big task.  It's kind of like hearding cats.  Only harder.  I thought there might be tears when it was time to box up all the bears and say goodbye, but the kids did great.  The teacher had explained several times over the past two weeks what was going to happen, so that no one was sad. 

Afterwards it was lunch at Chic Fil A (my favorite) and then we could take our kids home.  Sarah and I did some shopping (you know I can't help myself, I have nothing to wear!) and then went home.  When we got home, we crashed and took a nap.  Which, by the way,  is something else you can't do at work :)