Freezing Rainforest

Today I became more involved in my son’s education.

It was the scheduled day for the kindergartners to go on a field trip to the National Zoo in DC to the “Amazonia” rainforest exhibit.  There they could learn about and see some of the animal and plant life from the Amazon. And I decided to chaperone the trip. True, it meant taking a vacation day from work. But I had some carry-over days from last year, a meeting later in the day (not work-related), and an interest in monkeys with prehensile tails.  So I emailed the teachers a while back and asked if they needed my assistance.

I received an email back. Actually, they were fine. The two teachers plus one aide plus three other parent volunteers would be just fine for this group of 22 kids. But if I wanted to come along I certainly could.

I could say that I decided to commit to it because I felt that the ratio of one adult to every 3 ²/₃ kids was a bit too scarce for my taste. Perhaps I could mention that I wanted to commit poetic acts of geometry and bring the ratio to 22/7 — which is an accepted approximation of π. Yes — I’m that much of a nerd. But it wasn’t my driving force at the time.

I drove Av to school on this very, very cold morning — with wind-chill temperatures in the single digits.  My plan was to head home and snag breakfast (and a warmer hat) and meet the bus there. (I had asked Av if he just wanted to ride with me to the Zoo; he decided that it would be more fun to be on the bus with his friends. Who can blame him? I’ve ridden with me for several years now and it’s incredibly boring.)

Alas, I got stuck in some very heavy rush hour traffic.  I started to freak out a bit: what if they get there before me? What if my son thinks that I abandoned the trip to do something else? What will the monkeys think if I’m not there?  Great panic engulfed me on my drive there.

And to make matters worse — the parking lot closest to the Amazonia building was closed! Which meant having to walk about a half mile across the entire zoo. Normally it’s a wonderful walk, but in that weather it contracts your nether region al the way up above your kidneys. I briskly walked down to the rainforest. No kids.

Turns out that they were stuck in traffic as well.  Their trip to get to the zoo was about 75 minutes.

To go through an exhibit which lasted about 30 minutes.

But hey — we all had a good time. The kids were cute. They asked questions about eels and stingrays.  Probably the funniest part of it was seeing everyone wearing glasses come inside a humid rainforest from the bitter cold — and watching their glasses instantly fog up. But that wasn’t as fun as seeing the glasses re-fog and then frost over once they left the building at the end. But they liked the hands-on portions of the exhibit — looking into microscopes at bugs and feeling leaves and stuff.

Oh — and the other chaperones? two of the three were stuck in traffic as well. They arrived about five minutes before everyone boarded the bus to go back to school. So I guess it was good that I was there.

All in all — great kids. Very enthusiastic. I certainly would do this again. Maybe just once a year…