Bay Day 2008

Bay Day 2008: Alex and Chloe’s school hosts a festival at Sandy Point State Park and they call it Bay Day. I was a bit worried about going to an event with 100 or more preschoolers, but it turned out to be a nice morning. There are no buses, so each family had to drive their own child(ren) and stay to chaperone. The teachers were assigned “stations” to run such as face painting, digging for treasure, bean bag toss, sand castle building etc. There were enough stations that there was never much of a line for any one station and the beach had plenty of room for the crowd. The station where the kids spent the most time was the touch pool, which didn’t even have any prizes. One of the faculty, Mr Morehead, had filled a wading pool with bay water and blue crabs, bait fish, an oyster, a muscle, and a horseshoe crab. Mr. Morehead had put rubber bands on the crabs’ pinchers. At first Alex and Chloe didn’t want to touch anything, but they watched the other kids, and they watched Mr. Morehead as he held animals and talked about them. After a while they each got brave enough to hold a crab, and then they started sticking their hands into the pool and picking up whatever they could grab. After a while I had to drag them away to do something else. We ran into several kids from their class and Chloe was excited to see them. One little girl named Meredith dragged her mother over to introduce Chloe. Meredith is not in Alex and Chloe’s class, but sees Chloe in the hall while they wait to be picked up at the end of the day and apparently talks about Chloe all the time. Lately Alex has been saying that he doesn’t like going to school, doesn’t have friends at school, and is lonely at school. We’ve been talking to Alex and his teacher about this, but haven’t managed to improve the situation yet and since there is only one week of school left, I don’t suspect we will. Oh well, there is always next year.