Family Fun Night

Last night was one of the nights Sam and I most dread: Family Fun Night at the elementary school.  The fact that we dread it probably shows our poor sportsmanship about certain aspects of life, but it's true nonetheless. The flyer about Family Fun Night had come home in someone's school folder earlier in the week, and there had been multiple PTA emails about it, but neither of the girls had mentioned it.  Sam and I in hushed voices after bedtime decided that if nobody said anything about it, we wouldn't bring it up, but if they--on their own--said they wanted to go, we'd go.  This meant that on Friday afternoon, we still didn't know if we were all going . . . until the girls tumbled off the bus bubbling over with excitement, each expressed in their own unmistakeable way:

AC, frantic with joy: Mom!  Mom!  Mom!  It's Family Fun Night tonight!  Can we go?  I promised my friends I would meet them and we made an assembly point at the library.  I have to go so I won't miss them!  Can we go?  Please?
Gillian, braced for disappointment: Can we go?  I told my friends that we might not be able to go but I would ask . . . but I know that we might not be able to go.

So, we went.  Part of the fun of FFN is that parking is limited, and you have to park at the high school and take a shuttle, which means waiting with all the kids for the bus in the dark and cold, and then riding the bus and then swimming through the sea of humanity in the school while carrying armloads of coats and various crafts and trying to keep track of all the kids in mass chaos.  The classrooms all have games, like "Toilet Toss."  Two buckets were set up with toilet seats on top of them, and the kids got to throw rolls of toilet paper in.  While AC exulted in her toilet-tossing skills, we tried to keep LG entertained and distracted because he's done that more than once at home on his own and all we needed was to remind him of how much fun it was.  In the gym were a disco ball and music and hula hoops--kids raced around with them and we saw one child get knocked over by a hula hoop to the face (Sam, musingly: "I can't believe it took so long for that to happen").  They had pizza and bingo in the cafeteria, crafts in the art room.  There were fun moments, and it always touches me that people do these things for the kids.  The PTA had rented a photo booth, and the kids all got their picture taken with silly props.

Why do we dread it?  I don't know.  The crowds this year were much more manageable, as were the overall number of games.  The PTA probably would have liked it to have been bigger, but it was much more manageable this year I think.  To be honest, Sam's and my idea of Family Fun Night involves all of us lying around on the couches in the living room, reading.  Not leaving the house, and certainly not taking a shuttle bus anywhere.  Our poor children will probably have to drag us out, or they'll just go out without us.  But they are our fun, toilet-tossing or no.