Shocking, I Say!

It's time for another playground blog! I lasted about 10 minutes before boredom overtook me today. I'm just not cracked up to be a playground observer. It is agonizing....my mind thinks of all the others things I could be doing, and then the voices start complaining about how little fun they're having.....well, you know how it is, right?! So, I looked around and aha! Weeding! I can't get in trouble with that, can I? I had a few little helpers and we pulled weeds out of our new 4" deep mulch until we couldn't find anymore. We did it to help our elderly caretaker of the preschool who would usually be weeding for us, but is in the hospital recovering from quadruple bypass surgery. The kids loved helping Mr. Duane out. We shared some quality time hunting down weeds, nobody got hurt, and the kiddos received excellent weeding lessons! Pretty soon we had kids looking for those last few weeds like they would if it was an easter egg hunt. Some kids pulled out roots over a foot long!

Then as I was passing the slide, some kid got the horrible idea of going down the slide upside down and backwards and I would catch him (geez! where do they come up with this stuff?!) so I told him that it would be more fun if he went down feet first and we'd see who could shock who first...me or him?! It was a static-y day. Well, snap-crackle-pop! it was a doosie (it seriously kind of hurt) and next thing I know there's about 10 kids going down the double slide shocking me at the bottom. We'd hold out our fingers and just let the tips touch as the kids reached the bottom and CRRAACK! Of course I yelped, blew on my fingers, and made faces just to make the kids giggle and send them scurrying back up the stairs to shock me again! Oh what fun we had!

You'd think I'd be done, wouldn't you?! But I was begged to be the Jello Jiggler Monster again. By the cutest little bug-a-boo with her little shy smile. Who can say no?! But wait! We have revamped the game to make it safer. We now sit on the balance beam after a couple unfortunate injuries and the game morphed into little jigglers sneaking out of the fridge before I can count them all and while I'm looking for them they sneak back in. Well, sneaking while running & screaming that is. Still we had an almost-bloody nose last week so I had to institute another new rule - jello jigglers don't have long legs, so they can only race walk, not run. Because when 20 kids start running like cockroaches when you turn on the lights it's only a matter of time before someone gets hurt. All the other teacher lined up to laugh at me demonstrating to 20 kids sitting in a row what race walking looked like. I apparently make quite a silly sight. We played a few rounds and then I taught the kids about the saying "Quit While You're Ahead". So they put me in jail.

I think I will be a Jello Jiggler Monster for the Halloween parties next week. Taryn and I were looking at goofy sunglasses that had alot of potential. We have some wildly colorful fake hair left over from Crazy Hair Day, and I could probably print jello jiggler images off the computer and tape them all over me. Maybe I'll even make jello jigglers for their parties! But that might be stretching it. I think maybe I've made them once. Maybe.