The Doctor Is In

Earth Day is only four days away. Have you sent out your Earth Day cards yet?

We won the Amazing Race!!! - sort of. The Amazing Race was held at my son's school yesterday. It was limited to ten teams of Middle-schoolers and each team got one driver. I was the driver for the Backyardigans. Of course, we drew one of the Middle numbers (6) for our starting position. We were given one clue and had to figure out the destination, get there and the team had to complete a task to get their next clue. We screamed back and forth across town performing these tasks and were the first team to arrive at the finish line. We were the ONLY team to arrive at the finish line by the required 5:00PM. We had pizza and talked about our day's events while the judges tallied the scores; points were given for the fastest times for each event... After about an hour or so they announced the winners of each separate event. We won a couple of the events and the certificates for the events seemed to be equally distributed among the teams. Then came the time to announce the winners of the race.... The Backyardigans!!!! The boys went up and received their trophies and I took pictures. They were beaming. You remember Junior High. This was a big deal. Kids stuck in the Middle of the crowd were going to be recognized for one day in their junior high lives! Being mentioned on the morning announcements Monday at school, in the newspaper, maybe their faces on a box of Wheaties (Breakfast of Champions - patch on blog suit)...this is huge when you're 12 and 13 years old. As we were getting ready to leave one of the officials came up to the boys and said "we made a mistake, you got second place." She took the boys' trophies away and gave them to another team. Now the boys are mortified because they think everybody is laughing at them and they'll be made fun of Monday. Remember what it felt like in Middle School? If these boys had Carrie's powers 2012 would have come yesterday. I was waiting for Ashton Kutcher to walk out but still haven't seen him yet. It's hard being the adult in these situations because I know the boys were wronged. I know they rightfully won. I know these people were trying to do something nice for the kids. I also know there are people involved in these things that like to be big shots and I'd like to knock them down a peg which I am VERY VERY good at when pushed. I further know that being a poor sport and making a scene for $1.00 trophies is ridiculous, sets a really bad example and would make it worse for the boys so I let it go. Later last night my son said that it was a lot of fun and he appreciated me doing it with them. That was huge for me...thirteen-year-old boys don't show appreciation too often so I am very touched. He is whining about it on Facebook and making a bigger deal out of it than it needs to be now but he needs to vent without climbing the stairs in a bell tower. I bet a bell tower would give me a lot of steps on my I-Pod (Roz). I will monitor the venting and pull the plug when it gets to be just before psycho-babble.

Sorry I dedicated most of this blog to my venting about something silly but this is what happens everyday in Middle America. I doubt that most people read my blog on the weekends anyway. It's probably read most times while people are at work. That's what I'd do if I had a "regular" job (at break time only, of course).

Thanks for letting me vent...I will get off your couch now. Sorry about the crumbs.

- images ransacked from: thesniper.us (trophy), whhispermag.co.uk (Carrie) and giantbomb.com (Lucy Van Pelt) -