As I was driving home today from running errands, I passed two trucks carrying floats behind them. I couldn't tell what the floats were for because they didn't have a particular school listed on the side for say, a homecoming parade. Both floats were fairly empty, one having only a small tricycle in the middle. It was a bit strange, but it brought back memories of high school and my one and only float experience.
I offered to help construct the freshman class float and for several days we met after school at one of our classmates houses to put together this float. I thought floats were made of flowers, but no, as it turns out, most floats are tissue paper and chicken wire.
I got good at stuffing tissue into the holes of the chicken wire as we built a shape that looked sort of like a very angular football player. We used our school colors and made him look proud. When we were done, just before the homecoming parade, the float was delivered to our school by one of the parents and we eagerly awaited for school to be over so we could participate in the parade to the football field.
But there's more to this story, and that's that our high school didn't have our own football field. This was a strange situation but it was based on the school being located in an urban area with little free land coupled with lack of funds to build a football stadium from the city. What this meant was that we shared a football field with another school in the city.
So imagine this: you have a home game and the away team happens to be the school you share a stadium with. Your home game will be on their campus. This means you get to be on their "home" side and they have to go all the way across the stadium and act like they're from somewhere else for the entire game. And yeah, they hated us when that happened.
After I graduated, we eventually got our own stadium and I was so happy for those students that followed me. But back to the float and the homecoming parade. We're at our school and we have a float, but we have to make it to our stadium at that other school and the drive is close to ten miles. Also, imagine that we don't know what we're doing when it comes to float making.
The cheer leading squad was going to be sitting on the float and we were going to be cheering to all the random people we drove by that had no idea what was going on. I was one of those cheerleaders and I was on that float. We were so excited. We were fired up. We got on the float and we were ready to parade away.
You know where this is going, right? Disaster. We were no more out of the parking lot of the school when our square-ish football player couldn't handle the stress and fell over backwards onto the bed of the truck pulling him. Uh....Um....Gah.
We didn't know what to do. We felt embarrassed. We didn't know what to say. We laughed to the people we drove by, saying things like, "he's resting before the game." We knew those people didn't care. What we cared about right at that point was that we didn't have to ride around the football stadium in a broken float, because we weren't the class president and vice-president.
I don't remember, but I think they propped him up for the stadium parade. I think it was obvious, but it was better than nothing.
The Big Boy Update: Cat allergy? At practice thanksgiving at friends tonight my son had a bad allergic reaction on his face. He got very red and his eyes were blood-shot. This occurred just after he put the cat bed on top of his head. It could be, and most likely is, a cat allergy as both my mother and I have one. But I also have a dust mite and mold spore allergy and either of those items could have been in the cat bed. Bendaryl and some Calagel on his face and he didn't seem to care. He was most interested in playing with his friend, Gavin.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: Clingy sad. We went to practice thanksgiving tonight at a friend's house. My daughter fell asleep before we left, but that didn't explain her intense clingyness or unhappyness while we were there. She did eat food and eventually warmed up to the location, but it was a rough go for a while.
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