Dad on Duty #64

Here it is; Freedom Fest Day!   One of the two biggest school events all year (the other being Field Day in the spring).

I slept poorly. One of our businesses is at a real crossroads, and is stressing me out. All night, I’m going over the options in my head.

Suddenly the alarm goes off. Really? Is that thing set right?

Yep. It’s 0615. Time to start The Longest Day.

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Amy gets up with me and rouses La Princessa.

I’m still thinking about work. Amy asks: “are you OK?” I’m obviously not myself, withdrawn. “Yeah. Just distracted. Sorry”. Shake it off. Get connected to these people, here and now. This is the job that matters today.

Tori and I load up in the SUV and rush to Starbucks.

First thing on the agenda of The Longest Day is “Breakfast with Dads” starting at 0730. All Dads are invited to come spend a couple hours with their kids at school, starting (of course) with breakfast. And I’m bringing the coffee, milk and juice.

For about 400 people, we’re guessing (there’s no RSVP for this stuff).

We skid into Starbucks at 7:08.   And it’s packed. This is not starting well.

While in line, Tori says “we should get Ms Cervantes a chocolate croissant. She loves those!” We order that while we wait for our really, really big coffee buckets to arrive.

Behind us in line, we hear “Tori!”

It’s Ms Cervantes. Here to get her own chocolate croissant.

It’s now 7:12. We gotta go. Our giant coffees are ready to load. I tell Ms Cervantes “they’re going to call ‘David’ in a minute. That’s your croissant. See you in a few minutes”.

We load up the Coffee Armoires and start flying up Williams Drive toward the school. It’s now 7:18.

I’m chatting with Tori on the way, looking at her in the rear view mirror. Slowly, I realize something is missing….

“Do you have your backpack?” Tori looks around frantically. Our eyes lock in the mirror.

Crap.

About 100 yards later, I realize that’s NOT our biggest problem here.

I also forgot the milk and OJ. Maybe the kids can just drink coffee…..

Apparently I’m more distracted than I thought.

I hand my phone to Tori. “Text mommy and tell her we forgot your backpack, the milk and the juice and we need her to bring it all to the school. In the next 6 minutes”.

“‘We’ forgot it”?

“Just type, kid”. Smartass. She gets that from her mom.

Message sent.

We arrive at the school at 0725, just as Rosie texts me “you coming?!?”   There’s already a pretty big crowd.

I park the SUV like I used to stage my fire truck at a wreck; pretty much sideways on the curb.

Dads and kids are already going through the line. Ruth and Andy (another DOD there to help) look at me like “nice of you to join us….”   We quickly setup the coffee. Amy arrives in short order with the rest of the stuff. Coyly, I tell her “hey, I remembered the kid at least!” She’s actually very sweet and forgiving about it.

The crowd mows through over 500 sweet rolls and bear claws, plus another 300 or so of whatever the kitchen staff could throw out there.

Basically, they ate about 1,000 carb bricks in 30 minutes.

Me, Andy and Tori are frantically pouring milk and juice and restocking boxes with sugar bombs. Tori is also running around taking (these) photos.

At 0800, the Boss redirects the locust swarm to the classrooms.

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For the most part, this DOD thing is a good gig for Tori. She gets to do a lot of stuff with me, that the other kids don’t do. She’s a celebrity, and she’s exempted from a lot of the rules.

Occasionally, it’s not such a great deal for her.

As the parents start to funnel out to go to class with their kids, Tori asks me “are you coming to class with me?”   Without fully thinking about it, I respond “no; I’ve got to stay out here. None of these grownups are checked in”.

Here’s the issue; we didn’t run the visitors through the background check system. No way to do that fast enough. So we really don’t know that they’re “clear”. My Ops Spec for today includes me and a few other Dads staying out in the hallways to be watchful and immediately available, and then to sweep out all the adults at the end of the event at 0900.

From my viewpoint, that is my responsibility. And everyone is counting on me to handle it.

Tori tears up and starts to cry. She gets flushed and mottled (both she and her mommy change colors, like a chameleon, when they get upset).

“But that’s the whole point of this thing! For you to see what we do in the classroom!” I start to respond with “are you kidding….I see you in your classroom all the time”, but stop myself.

She really wants this experience with me. Soon enough, she will not. Soon enough.

I make my choice.

But I get Tori to agree to a compromise; we’ll do the math stations out in the hallway where I can hear and be available. I realize it’ll be fine; the risk here is tiny, and there are 4 dads in the building I know that are cops. If anything gets sideways, we’ll have it handled in about 10 seconds.

Tori has a blast showing me how they do their math. And I do too.

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After lunch, several more Dads show up to start setting up for the Fest. We start moving desks and tables, scouting out power supplies for the games and bouncy houses, figuring out parking.

The Boss pops by and asks if we can move the “memory bricks” from the art patio upstairs to the front lawn; a Dad is coming by this weekend to (finally) install them around the flagpole.

There are a LOT of bricks. They are really heavy. And they are…of course…upstairs (why?!?!). Yay.

“Yes ma’am. We’ll get it”.

Over the course of the afternoon, I do two loads myself. Then recruit some guys to do the last load, as my back starts hurting.

Some of the guys are in the music room assembling items for the Fest, like a new basketball game that had, conservatively, 9,000 parts.

A Mom walks in. “Hi! I’ve been sent to help. I guess I’m the token female for this project!” All the other Moms are in the PTA room (it’s a lot like 3rd grade, really. Boys over here, girls over there). The three Dads look up at her, tools and parts strewn all over the place. One says “well, we aren’t reading the directions, and we got a whole bunch of pieces left over, so jump on in!” She stands there for a moment, then turns around and walks out, headed to the PTA room.

Really. That actually happened.

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One of our DOD’s is a professional electrician. A huge potential challenge to the Fest is power; so many of the games and attractions need juice, plus the lights we need to add, that we run the risk of popping a breaker. It happened last year, and really messed us up.

If we blow a breaker this year, we’ll likely lose all of the gym or all the lights outside. A Fest-ending event. And the District is not interested in sending a maintenance guy out…on overtime…to fix a problem we created with our poorly planned distribution of electric demand.

So we decide we need to mitigate that risk with our in-house resources.

Our Electrician Dad identifies the room most likely to house the breakers that we’re interested in. “Does your key open that door?” Nope. But I’m pretty sure I know which key does.

I retrieve that key….probably marginally against a rule of some sort, but let’s keep that between us….and we try it.

Pop. We’re in. Electrician Dad looks around. “Yep. This is it. We’re golden”.

Sure enough, about halfway through the Fest, we lose power to the wall plugs in the cafeteria. No problem, watch this.

I call Electrician Dad on the radio. “We popped the cafeteria”. “Got it”. He reset it in a couple minutes, and no one was the wiser.

That’s how we roll….

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The big attractions….bouncy houses, Velcro wall, hamster ball, etc….are supposed to arrive at 4 pm. The Fest starts at 5.

At 4:15, we’ve seen no one.

Lisa, the Mom overall in charge of this event (if she wasn’t slobbering drunk by 9:30 that night, there’s something really wrong with her) starts calling vendors. Pretty much: where the hell are you?

At 4:40….no kidding….they all show up. Grand.

There is frantic, somewhat angry, toiling by all hands to get all this stuff put together and running in about 15 minutes. But it’s done, and our first customer walks out to a completed, operating Fest.

Here we go!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Our part of the Fest is pretty simple; keep the kids in, keep any bad guys out, solve mission-critical problems, maintain kid safety (no, you can’t climb the soccer goal in the dark), render first aid and find lost people.

Over the course of 2 1/2 hours, we did a lot of all those.

We had about 10 lost people. But we had 10 Dads patrolling the grounds. There was a Dad or staff member on radio about every 150 feet. When someone transmitted a lost kid, we found him or her in about 3 minutes.

After the third one of those, where we had located the kid in….really…less than a minute, one Dad turned to me and said “We are *really* good at this”. With genuine pride.

I made about 8 first aid runs. All band aids.

We pulled kids off the playscape and outta trees.

At one point I looked toward the back of the Fest area and see headlights approaching the open area near the playscape. A truck pulls up way too close to the activity zone.

“What the #%*+” I mutter, hopefully not too loud.

Big John is much closer to the truck than I am. He’s looking the other way though, and doesn’t see the vehicle approaching behind him.

Big John has “it”. He’s good at this.

I call John on the radio. “Look to your right”. He locks on to the truck and without hesitation, marches straight at it with conviction. Me and another Dad start moving that way to back him up. We don’t need to; within a few seconds he has the situation under control. Just a Dad dropping his kid off. But I bet he ain’t going to do it like that again.

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It’s time to tear down. It looks overwhelming; dozens of desks, tables, chairs, cords and other items need to be picked up and returned to their homes. There’s 1000 feet of colored paper taped to the gym floor.

Everyone pitches in; moms, dads, staff members and even kids. We had budgeted an hour and a half for teardown and clean up. We are done in 20 minutes.

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13.6 miles and 35,000 steps later, the Longest Day is over. I think everyone had a great time. But more importantly, everyone left with the right number of kids, more or less in one piece.