The Reformed Slacker Mom

I'll admit it. I'm a slacker mom. I do my best to shirk responsibility when it comes to helping at my children's school. I mean, come on, I have enough to take care of here at home. What would I do with Keelie while I was trying to help the other children? I can just see her terrorizing the class room. She'd rip the posters off the walls, destroy the homework on the teacher's desk, steal off with the crayons and glue. Maybe I'd never be asked to help again.

So it's no big surprise to hear that I say no to the calling of helping on field trips every time. Until now. You see, my husband signed up to chaperon my son's kindergarten class on a field trip to the zoo. Younger siblings weren't allowed to join the crowd, so there, I had an easy out. Unfortunately, the date of the day of fun at the zoo didn't make my husband's work calendar and the secretaries booked his morning with all sorts of meetings that just couldn't be rescheduled. On the exact day we discovered the scheduling error, the teacher sent home a note thanking him for his willingness to help and added a list of instructions detailing exactly what he would be doing.

"You'll just have to call her and tell her that I can't make it to the field trip," my husband explained. Yeah, as if it's that simple.

Then Aiden looked at me with his big green eyes and asked, "Why can't you come, Mom?"

Oh, I tried explaining to him that I had Keelie to take care of. She needed to get to and from preschool and have her lunch and a nap ... blah, blah, blah. He simply stated, "Ask Benjy to do it." Say what? Ask my brother to help me out? My husband was quick to jump on board that one. "Sure, he'll take care of her. He'll get her to school on time and everything."

What could I say? I guessed I had to give it a try. I called my brother, asked him, thanked him for his willingness to help out, and prepared a list detailing exactly what he needed to do. Then I joined Aiden at school this morning to chaperon his field trip to the zoo.

I'll admit I was nervous. How would I handle a group of strange kindergartners at the Hogle Zoo? What if they got hungry? What if they needed to go to the bathroom? What if I needed to go the bathroom? I swallowed my anxieties, took my little group of boys into the zoo and ... had a really great time. I mean, I actually enjoyed myself. We learned about giraffes and strange Chinese cats. We saw the tiger and gorilla and got up close and personal with an orangutan. We watched two black bears fighting and stared at the horns of a white rhino. I don't think I've had a better time at the zoo.

And the best part? As I drove Aiden home from school he said to me, "Mom, this was the best day of my life."