I left work a little early to swing by for some food and then went to the school. Even though the festivities weren't set to get started until 7pm, we've learned at that school that with most events, if you aren't there by 6pm at least, forget about any kind of decent seat. Well, I picked up a pizza, got to the school around 5:25, and the girls and I ate and got inside by at least 5:45. Even so, five or six rows back from the front was the best we could do, which means a whole lot of people were there at 5:25 or earlier like I was but chose not to eat or ate earlier, all so they could get good seating. So I guess we'll need to try two hours ahead of time for the next event. Sheesh.
Anyway, from there it was time to play relative seat lottery. We had lots of potential attendees from both sides of the family claiming they would be present, but no true picture of who all would really be there. However, everyone wanted a reserved seat. The trouble with that, of course, is reserved seat maintenance. There's probably some kind of formula for pressure received from peripheral audience members looking for seating that is directly proportional to the number of seats you are holding, and that increases exponentially as show time nears and overall available seating reduces. And because we had no clear picture of who exactly would attend, we had reserved a whole row of seats (~10 seats) in the middle section. Well, since none of the relatives started getting there until maybe 6:40, for nearly an hour the ex and I were ourselves trying to hold those seats, so we pretty much couldn't go anywhere for more than a few seconds at a time, lest the seats we worked so hard to maintain be overrun by the seat vultures.
And as misfortune would have it, more people showed up than we had seats for, and by that time it was standing room only in that place, so I felt pretty bad it worked out that way. But there were people that showed up that I wasn't expecting, AND there were people that DIDN'T show up that I WAS expecting, so how could we have really known how many seats to hold? I couldn't imagine trying to hold two rows of seats with just the two of us there for that. There was actually a group in front of us that was attempting to hold two rows, but that didn't work out. They lost half a row to the seat hounds when they let their guard down, and they had more people seat-guarding than we did. With our seating situation as it was, we squeezed togother (i.e. in some cases two people to a seat) and had Darby sit on the floor. But even then a few of our family had to go stand up in the back. Talk about guilty conscience. I would have given up my seat had I not had the camcorder tripod all setup and ready to go where I was at.
I'm not sure if you can imagine it, but with Shelby and Darby wanting to run around and play with the other kids (on stage even, which just wouldn't do, and there was plenty of pressure there because we wouldn't let them even though every other kid in the place was running around creating havoc), and all the seat maintenance issues, it was more than an hour of near-chaos for the ex and I.
Once the festivities were underway and all the seating pressure was largely relieved, the school did quite the good job putting the ceremony together. There were a couple of song-and-dance numbers that the kids performed, a lengthy multimedia slide-show retrospective of the year, and the traditional diploma/name-calling session with pomp and circumstance playing in the background.
Following was a reception in the cafeteria with cake and punch and more chaos. While overall it went well, and was a special evening for Shelby, it wasn't without the fraying of nerve endings. But I am not dead, so I must be stronger, right?
Oh, and we even got to meet Shelby's apparent boyfriend, the source of a recent bringing home of flowers by Shelby that I failed to blog about. The little boy's mother informs us that Shelby is "the love of his life" as he never stops talking about her. None of that helped to heal the nerve endings I can tell you.
It was after nine when we got home, and after ten before we got to bed. Tomorrow is the last day of school, and then next week begins summer camp, which is all mostly good. It would be better if the year weren't screaming by and I was thereby more prepared.
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