Darling Little Angels

Parenthood is an amazing thing. There are so many precious moments that I've had sprinkled throughout my days that I cannot imagine what my life would be like without my beautiful little girl. That being said, I hate children. I don't hate them ALL, and I don't hate them ALL the time. Just most of them, most of the time.

Before I had a child, I thought that my dislike of them was merely the result of a lack of knowledge about how to deal with them. I assumed that once I had one, I would love them all. Boy was I wrong!!

I recently volunteered to chaperone a field trip to the zoo with my daughter's first grade class. I knew when I agreed to go that it was probably not going to be the most enjoyable day I've ever had but I figured that it couldn't be too traumatic. After all, there were going to be at least 4 other adults there to help corral the 18 children that went. Again, I was wrong.

From the moment the children were grouped up with the adults, I found myself fighting the urge to hang myself with their backpacks. They chatter non stop (nothing they said came even close to being intelligable), they only have one volume (extremely loud) and their voices are ALL incredibly high pitched. I'm certain that confining all that noise within one tiny bus did wonders for the stock price of Tylenol. Adding to the noise level from my own child's class was yet another class of first graders, crammed into the same bus, with parent chaperones that looked just as miserable as I was. The noise level was no where near the worst part though.

After we endured 3 hours of chasing the children around the zoo, resisting the urge to toss them into the cages with the animals, fighting the feeling that maybe WE would be better off in the cages with the animals and questioning the decision to remove corporal punishment from schools, we had to load them all onto the bus for the ride home.

As traumatic as the ride TO the zoo was, the ride home took it to a whole new level of horror. This time, we didn't just have the excited noise level to push us to the brink of insanity, we also had the smell. I don't know if that odor was present on the ride home, if it was triggered at the zoo or if the stench of the zoo simply cleared my sinuses enough for me to notice it but the only word that could describe that smell was REVOLTING.

Children always seem to have a slight aroma to them. Little boys more so than little girls, but it doesn't seem to pass over any child. I always attributed this to the fact that they have such tiny bodies that the odors that accumlate on a daily basis simply have no where to go. After the zoo, I'm beginning to rethink that theory and revise it into one that just states that kids stink solely because they are kids!!

As the trip drew to a close and I plotted the fastest route off that bus and back to the safety of my child free car, I vowed to myself that I would NEVER go on another field trip like that again. Jadyn seems to have other plans though.....she came home from school, crawled into my lap, laid her head on my shoulder, looked into my eyes and said "Momma, thanks for coming with me today. I must be the most special little girl in the whole world!!".....and just like that, I volunteered for the field trip the next day.

I still don't like children and I'm beginning to doubt that I will ever learn to like them. However, regardless of my apparent allergy to that smelly, loud, disrespectful classification of humans known as children, as long as I am rewarded for my torment with words of adoration from my daughter, I suppose I will continue to subject myself to close encounters with those darling little angels for a few more years.