After lunch I went to Darby's school to see if I could join her at the arts festival tomorrow. She was scheduled to participate, but I originally wasn't going to be able to help out. When I learned that a deadline I was working against was pushed back to next week, I decided to see if I could go along (the school had previously announced that they needed sponsors). However, when I got to the school and started asking around, all of the teachers I asked seemed confused about Darby's level of participation. At one point during the confusion, there were four teachers, Darby, and myself standing in the hallway (during school hours, so being a little disruptive... and oh yeah, during all of this Shelby lost a tooth in her class so she came running out into the hallway, "daddy, daddy, I lost a tooth," further adding to the mayhem) trying to figure out the disconnect. I explained that Darby had gotten two information sheets, one for an arts festival this week and one for an arts expo next week, and that money had been sent to school with her to register for this week's festival, so I was expecting she would participate. All the teachers essentially said that the artwork was sent home with her, but that they had her down as not having brought it back and not having paid, so I was getting a little frustrated by this point. I told the teachers that I personally had the artwork matted as required and brought it back to the school myself and that Darby's mother had sent a check in to pay for the registration. This is when I first learned that there were two different artworks, one for each event, but that Darby had lost one of them and didn't tell me. The teachers said they didn't know she lost it until the day it was due and then there wasn't anything they could do to recover (had they known sooner they could have had her do another artwork, but she couldn't use the other work she did for both festivals because it was not the right kind of art). Knowing she didn't have that first piece of art, Darby stashed the check sent to school in her desk instead of giving it to the teacher. When interrogated about it in the hallway, she went and got it. I apologized to all of the teachers for wasting their time and disrupting the day, and then had a further conversation in the hallway with Darby. She started to cry because she thought I was mad at her, but I explained that this was an extra-curricular activity so I wasn't too broken up about it. I told her the real shame was that I was trying to do something special for her by taking half a day off work and spending it with her at the arts festival, but that was all moot now. I said the real issue was lack of communication on her part. If she had just told me up front when she lost the art, we could have asked the school what to do, and they would have had her do another piece.
After that whole arts festival fiasco, I headed back to work for a meeting, shaking my head along the way. But I had to leave work again immediately after the meeting to pick up Darby earlier than usual so I could get her fed before her ballgame. I would have waited until afterward given the hecticness of the day, but Darby had to be at church after the game. Just getting her to the field on time proved challenging though. I picked her up, we swung by the house, her mother called explaining she was stuck in traffic, so I went back to the school to pick up Shelby (who was supposed to go with her mom to fencing lessons) and take her with us to get something to eat. I was going to have the girls' mother meet us at the sports complex after we picked up food, but I learned she was already in the area, so we had to head back towards the school to trade off Shelby. Finally, Darby and I were able to head for the field (she had been eating in the car the whole time, and fortunately she remembered that I sent her uniform with her to school and changed like I had asked her to).
The coach was later than usual to the game and no other parents were warming up the kids, so I got Darby up and started warming her up with ground balls. Of course as usual, the other kids started to join in and I didn't want to be rude by excluding them, so before I knew it I was warming up the whole team. Trouble is, it was not my day for throwing balls to kids. In the span of just a few minutes, I had four times injured a kid (one of them twice). First a kid missed the grounder I threw and it hit her in the ankle. She went crying of the field. Then, two kids later the girl got a glove on the ball, but in bringing her glove up, the ball bounced out and hit the girl behind her in the forehead. She went crying off the field. Yet another two kids later, the kid (this time it was Darby) didn't put her throwing hand over the glove when the ball went in, so it bounced up and clocked her in the jaw pretty solidly. She tried to go crying off the field, but I gave her a hug and told her to get back in line. Just before we were out of warm-up time, the first girl had come back, but she got hit in the other ankle. SHEESH. As if all that weren't enough, during the game, a foul ball was hit right to me, so I threw it back to a kid on the opposing team (they were fielding), and the ball bounced out of her glove and hit her in the head. Fortunately, it was the catcher, and she had her mask on, so there was no harm done. But man, it started to seem like I was purposely taking shots at the kids.
Probably because of my "battery" of the team, they started off real slow. Before we knew it we were losing 4-zip. Towards the end of the game, though, we had come back to tie it (Darby had a hit and a run scored), but right at the climax, Darby and I had to leave. She was already going to be a couple minutes late at the church. (I later found out the team lost in extra innings).
So we walked into the church, freshly grimey from the game, and sure enough everyone is waiting for us. You see, tonight was Darby's First Reconciliation (first confession), which proceeds her First Communion here in a couple weeks. Just after we arrived the priest said there were four other kids missing but that we weren't waiting any longer, so things got started. The whole way to the church in the car, Darby expressed fear about this process. But her fears were quest fairly quickly with the assurances of the priest. When it was all said and done, Darby herself was saying she was all scared for nothing.
The priest made a point of celebrating after reception of each of the sacraments, so afterwards I took Darby for some ice cream (hey, his suggestion). Of course, before she was halfway done with it, she dropped the scoop right off her cone onto the ground. A perfectly crazy ending to a rather crazy day.
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