My girls had their annual Plainfield Elementary School Jogathon yesterday. In our house, it's more like the day we go to watch the girls NOT run. There are many variations of this excercise. We call them the semi-run. The run only when teachers are looking or yelling. The run one lap, and then walk the rest. Or, my personal favorite.....the walk if you feel like it and say "to hell with it all".
Lolo has mastered the actual run. The kind of run you do till you just can't do it no more. We call it the do run run.
Oh Lolo. Smaller than most of the species her age, she runs and smiles. And smiles and runs. And her knees are up by her elbows, but still she runs..... She ran 8 laps around a 1/6 mile track. That is roughly 1 and 1/3 miles. Pretty good I say.
Now Alaina, my oldest, and perhaps most closet-girly of all three (I say closet-girly because she will swear she hates pink, but cry if she breaks a sweat and is VERY worried about her hair) hates the Jogathon. She likes the sunshine, the open-air market (i.e. shopping) and the water horse (which is just a giant drinking fountain) but could live without the whole production all together. She's actually a lot like me when I was young, except she does what she feels like doing instead of doing what she's supposed to for fear of the consequences - which was what I always did. So, since she feels like walking, she walks. It doesn't really matter to me what she does, except she could use the excercise (she's a little on the lazy side - ssshhhh).
Julianna runs until her cheeks turn bright red, and I think her health is failing, and then she gets a drink, and walks a little, then runs some more. She is really thin and her skin is pale, and she turns this shade of pink that makes you think she has heat stroke, but it's just her normal look for breaking a sweat. Maybe it worries me because I don't see her break a sweat much(?) Until, near the very end, when she quit jogging or running or walking all together and went.........(drumroll please).......... shopping! But, she got caught by a teacher who told her she couldn't buy anything yet because she was supposed to still be on the track with the rest of her class. Ooops, busted. But, Papa told her "who cares", and held her on his lap until she got to go shopping. We won't tell anyone that she's my "To hell with it!" kid.
The girls spent plenty of money on very necessary items such as rain sticks made out of wrapping paper tubes filled with sand and covered with magazine pictures. Dried gourds make anything from a vase (julianna bought me one) to a bird feeder. Small blackboards on popsicle sticks make very fine garden plant labels (don't ask me what you do when it rains and washes the chalk off). Many plants are for sale and you can even buy a bag of garbage/soil (homemade compost) for 50 cents.
You know, I joke about the day, and the activities, and the kids, but you can't beat Plainfield for the old-school kind of school where parents show up and take pictures (and know everyone's names) and chear on the home team.....Hurray for jogging, walking, hiding out, quitting early, shopping and just plain growing up. You can't beat any of it!
