Field Tripping & Falling Down

by Cathy

Last week, Bella coerced me into chaperoning a class field trip to the Museum of Science & Interesting (her toddler term for the Museum of Science & Industry). By 'coerced', I mean, "Here's a notice for our next field trip to the museum. Can you please, please volunteer to be a chaperone?"Yeah, I had to switch some days around at work but you don't have to twist my arm. I could spend days there - and the Planetarium. In my past life, I'm convinced I was a scientist.

I was assigned a group of seven fifth grade girls. I thought this was kind of a biggish group of girls but I could handle it, right? They're only in fifth grade.

First, we headed off to the educational labs for 90 minutes of Colorful Chemistry! These labs were the entire purpose of the field trip. After that was taken care of, we were free to roam the museum at will until it was time to board the bus at 2pm.

 As soon as we stepped out of the labs, I got bombarded.
 "Can we go to the Coal Mine?" 
"Ooooh, can we go to the hamster wheel?" 
"I want to go see the baby chicks hatch! Can we, can we?"
"We haaaave to go to the Storm Centers!"
"Where's the map? Can I have the map?"

After some wandering around, pinpointing locations on the map, being distracted by wind tunnels, avalanche formations, air ball machines and of course, a turn on the human hamster wheel, which let me tell you, makes treadmills feel like you're taking a stroll, we run into other groups from our school with their haggard chaperones in tow.

"You have to go to the Happy Brrrr-day exhibit! We made ice cream!" squealed the sugar-highed girls. "NO! You have to go on the flight simulators!" screamed others.

 Meanwhile, I was thinking, 'Whose brilliant idea was this? To let one adult loose in a giant museum with seven kids and no game plan? It was like I was willingly taking my two kids x 100 all by myself to the museum for the day. What adult in their right mind would do that? One hundred times more requests, 100 x more questions, 100 x more 'Can we?' 'I want to' 'But they went' 'Do you have any money?' The flight simulator was $4 per person to board, so when I turned it down - because I'm not shelling out $32 to get strapped into a seat with high-pitched screaming girls going upside down in a dark, metal tube - one girl pleaded: "Please?? Can you just pay for me and I'll pay you back tomorrow??"

Thankfully, it was time for lunch (for which we got precisely 20 minutes to shove down our throats) so we headed downstairs to assemble in the school lunchroom. All the while, I was still being bombarded with, "Why aren't we going to the Coal Mine????" and ""When can we go see the baby chicks hatch???" and "What are we doing after lunch??"

After lunch and before I was literally going to go out of my mind, I marched the giddy group up to see the baby chicks, (none of which were actively hatching but in the process of hatching which apparently, could take hours), and then we all agreed as a group to go to the Coal Mine.; well, all except one.
"Kate is scared to go in the Coal Mine!" blurted out a random girl. I looked over at Kate and she was on the verge of tears.
I pulled her to the side. "What's wrong, honey? You don't want to go into the Coal Mine exhibit?"
She gave a few quick shakes of the head. "No."
"You don't have to be sacred - it's not scary, it's educational. And we will all be there with you the whole time," I comforted her.
"But, I'm claustrophobic and I'm afraid of Black Lung Disease!' she almost whimpered back. I could see she was visibly upset.
"You do know that this isn't a real coal mine, right? It's all fake and it's just an exhibit created to look like one," I half-smiled back.
"Yeah, but I'm still scared."

As a chaperone, I had a very difficult decision to make. Either let the girls go alone and I would stay with Kate (which I was very hesitant to do), urge Kate to come with us and be a trouper because I couldn't let the other girls go alone, or, we forfeit that particular exhibit altogether and go elsewhere - dear, Lord.
After posing this to coal miner A.J., standing at the exhibit's entrance, he promptly informed me that the girls needed a chaperone to go into the exhibit with them.

Then I witnessed something fantastic: the maturity level of my group of girls. Yes, some of the girls were disappointed but they were also very concerned about Kate's fears, and if need be, we could go elsewhere in the museum. Seeing the sacrifice her friends were willing to make, Kate decided then and there that she would go into the exhibit.
"Are you SURE??" I asked her twenty times over, not wanting to be responsible if she had a claustrophobia-induced panic attack while down there or worse yet, become infected with Fake Black Lung Disease.

I could tell she was scared but insisted that she could handle it. During the half-hour exhibit tour, I was keeping her close, making jokes and putting a reassuring arm around her. She was a total trouper to say the least.

Finally on the bus, I sat quietly with another mom chaperone until she blurted out, "I made Helen [her daughter] cry."
"What? Why?" I asked, pretending not to intuit what happened.
"They kept running off and I had to call after them telling them not to run off where I couldn't find them because I was responsible for them," she explained hurriedly. "Finally, I had it."
"Did you scream at them?"
"At the top of my lungs," she said, head bowed.
The poor lady had snapped with all the pressure of watching six other kids besides her own in a cavernous museum. Like Michael Douglas, she had her Falling Down moment in a public museum in front of her daughter and almost ALL of her friends.

I guess we were all challenged with being troupers in one form or another that day. It's not referred to as The Museum of Science & Interesting for nothing, you know.