Those of you who know me will find this very hard to believe, but for the past several months, I have been organizing my church’s vacation bible school. It happened last week.
And I survived.
There were no lightning bolts flung from the heavens, no burning flesh whenever I shook hands with our pastor each evening, nothing.
Except that all of the children were spawn of Satan himself!
I’m kidding, of course. Although, I did help out with the five and six-year-old class during a couple of nights (there were 12 kids in that class) and to say that they were “challenging” is an insult to the New York Times crossword. The boys! The boys!
I just kept thinking, ‘Oh my God, is this what my son is going to be like in a few years?’ And the answer is most certainly yes.
Case in point: There was a plastic bin of Crayons. In said bin, someone had placed a number of Pokemon-branded crayons, probably thinking that the kids would just be tickled to death at Pokemon crayons. Not all of the crayons were so lucky, however. And the boys went absolutely bonkers over the @#$% Pokemon crayons. They were hoarding them like gold! At one point, I said, ‘Guys, they’re just crayons,’ to no avail.
So a few nights later I picked them out of the bin. They looked at me like I had just drowned their families’ cats. ‘But why?’ they asked.
‘Because we’re not here for Pokemon, guys,’ I responded.
They sat looking at me, blinking.
‘Why are we here, guys?’ I asked, hopefully. More blank stares.
‘For Jesus [DAMMIT]!’ I wanted to yell. I only sighed. Maybe next year…