Sparkly Green Earrings by Melanie Shankle

Author:Melanie Shankle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: RELIGION / Christian Life / Family
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2013-02-08T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

Putting the Crazy on Display

Here in San Antonio we have an annual two-week celebration called Fiesta. It allegedly has something to do with Texas’s independence from Mexico, but I think it’s really just an excuse for everyone to take off work and for the socialites to wear crowns and pretend they’re real royalty. There are always parades and various foods served on a stick and coronations and multiple stabbings by angry drunks. Good times.

Caroline’s preschool liked to celebrate Fiesta by having the kids create their very own shoe-box floats. The teachers sent home a note regarding all the Fiesta activities they had planned for the kids. I know it seems that a visit from real, live royalty in the form of King Antonio would be more than enough, but it’s not. A visit from King Antonio would have required little to no parent suffering, which was just not acceptable.

The note went into great detail about how each year the kids make these floats and how it is such an enjoyable experience for the teachers and kids that many parents requested that they be able to make this a family project to be done at home.

Who are these parents?

No one would fess up, for fear of being ostracized from the preschool community.

So while there was technically still the option of having your child make the float at school with the help of the teacher, the implication was that you could either spend hours with glue-and-glitter-coated fingertips or hang your head in shame after essentially admitting you were an uninvolved parent whose child tucked herself into bed each night while you and your husband sipped martinis in the living room.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t like to publicize it, but I secretly love a good craft project. The problem is not with the craft in and of itself; the problem is I know it will unleash my OCD tendencies. I know I won’t rest until I have glittered and tissue-papered and decorated within an inch of my life because we all know that three-year-olds have the attention span of a flea in a dog pound, and if I wanted Caroline to pull a float that consisted of more than a shoe box with a Hello Kitty sticker on it, it would be up to me.

I immediately sold Caroline on the idea of a Wizard of Oz–themed float because McDonald’s was giving out Wizard of Oz Happy Meal toys at the time. I envisioned a miniature Oz-themed paradise, complete with darling Madame Alexander Happy Meal figurines standing under a glittered rainbow.

The problem was every time we went to McDonald’s, we got Dorothy or the Munchkin. No Wicked Witch, no Tin Man, no Scarecrow. I hated to be high maintenance at McDonald’s (which is fairly ironic, considering it doesn’t really bother me to be high maintenance anywhere else) and ask for a specific Happy Meal toy. I just kept playing the drive-thru like I was at a craps table in Vegas, hoping my luck would change.

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