Universal Craziness: band trip

5a.m. Saturday morning found me wondering what on earth had possessed me to volunteer as a chaperone for the band field trip to Universal Studios. Sitting on a charter bus full of 7th and 8th grade boys in the pre-dawn hours, with the movie "Transformers" blasting throughout the bus, I thought I had probably made a big mistake. It was a little too much testosterone for my blood.

I must note that, for all my concerns with Carter's band teacher, he does one thing that makes him a pretty smart guy in my book: he completely separates genders on field trips. Therefore, we had a girl bus and we had a boy bus. We had girl chaperones and we had boy chaperones. I had thought I was avoiding a lot of giggling and squealing by being a boy chaperone, but I found that boys have their own foibles.

For one thing, I was shocked by their proclivity and ability to scale up any and all vertical surfaces. I'm not kidding. If there was a wall, divider, statue, or even a person that was standing too still, these boys would run up and attempt to climb up to the very top of said object. Or leap frog over said object (or person.) So mostly my job was to keep these boys from breaking their scrawny little necks.

But I digress. We got to the park and the band performed on Universal Studios main stage in the morning. They sounded terrific, and we were all more than a little impressed to see these kids up there playing and behaving so professionally. Again, my reluctant hat off to the band teacher!

Afterwards, we joined forces with my fellow chaperone and good pal, Corrine, as we spent the rest of the day exploring "Islands of Adventure." Between the two of us we had 9 boys to look after, which at times was no easy feat! (They were all in matching yellow band t-shirts, luckily, which made it a bit easier. But as I was head-counting matching kids, it felt not much different than the head-counting of matching kids I do every day with my little ones!)

We had a fantastic time and I was really glad I went, despite my pre-dawn concerns! We bought "Express Passes" which allowed us to fast pass every ride, so we got to do all the big coasters, which was fun. And we ate at Hard Rock Cafe, wherein I was declared a "cool chaperone" because I passed the boys' music trivia quiz. (I could name 3 "cool bands", I could sing the lyrics to a Blink 182 song, and I knew who the grandfather of punk was.) While glad to be deemed "cool", I was quite disheartened when the boys saw a poster of Bono and said, "Hey, who's the old dude?" That was a dagger to the heart! (Only to be made worse when another boy mentioned that Bon Jovi looks like his plumber. Ouch!)

It was thrilling to be able to keep up with a bunch of rambunctious boys for an entire day! Now if only it didn't take me so long to recover from it! (I'm still exhausted!!!)