Our Day at CAVOC

My children's school district has an outdoor classroom that the kids seem to get to go to two times a year. Peanut went on her first trip of this school year today and I was a chaperone. In case you're wondering what CAVOC stands for it is short for Cedric A. Vig Outdoor Classroom.

I was kicked into the overacheiving mom mode which made her a couple of minutes late for school. I guess I should have had her ride the bus this morning. What a great way to start the day, huh? I had all of these things I didn't have the energy to do last night that I "had" to do this morning before I left the house instead. I was fortunate enough to have at least lukewarm water for my shower this morning thankfully. What on earth was I thinking?

I helped Peanut's teacher get everything ready and put numbers on the kids' hands, everything was going pretty well. I managed to get the numbers on everyone's hands, supervised them at the bathrooms, and helped them open the milk cooler to get their milk for lunch and snack.

Once the bus came, things went downhill a bit. The bus wasn't the size it was supposed to be, so we were short a few seats. It took a bit of scrambling to get everything together. All of us parent chaperones ended up driving to save room on the bus.

Since it took a while to sort things out we ended up getting a late start. The poor bus driver must have had someplace she wanted to be, because as soon as the last kid had cleared the bus she was off like a rocket.

Normally that wouldn't be a bad thing, but since we had waited for the students to get off the bus before we grabbed the coolers and lunches off the bus... We needed our lunches, milk, and supplies!

Being the weirdo that I am, I took off after the bus thinking I might be able to catch her attention in the rear view mirror. Most of the time there's no witnesses to my crazy antics, but this time there were plenty! Here I am running down the dirt road waving my hands frantically over my head desperately trying to get her attention. They must have thought I was quite a piece of work. We had to call the bus company to have her come back. I'm sure if Anna would have been there she would have been ROFLMHBO. The kids thought that it was humorous. Peanut made up a chase the bus game too. Looking back I guess that would be a rather entertaining sight to watch.

The rest of the day shaped up well though aside from a bee episode or two concerning people other than me. We had to shift the students into different groups to accomodate the bus mishap's taking up so much time. The children made a terrarium, played island tag, took a nature walk, watched a movie about pollution, had recess, and made s'mores. Sorry about no pictures of the activities but I got some of the other kids' faces in the pictures. I figured that wouldn't be great to publish their pictures to the internet without permission. I did take an excellent picture while we were on our hike this afternoon though.



Look at the size of that fungus growing on the side of that birch tree!

We saw all kinds of lovely tamaracks while we hiked through the bog, I wish I would have thought to take their picture! I wish I could grow tamarack at my house, but I don't think my condtions are right for them. They are one of my favorite kinds of pine trees, their needles are so soft. I think they are also the only pine tree that looses it's needles every year as if it was a deciduous tree.

Thank you for stopping by. Please leave me a message and a backlink. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Cindy