Eight eights

It was cub scouts tonight. We finished up our last requirement for the Wolf badge. Boom. It was our last meeting with EIGHT 8-year-old boys, and I feel so relieved! They are good boys, but it is very chaotic trying to get Required Stuff done with so much energy in one small room. I can't bring myself to force the boys to sit still on a weeknight after a long day at school, so I don't push the discipline very far. Kids get enough of strict adults at school! My laxity does seem to make the boys' volume and energy expand exponentially, though. It is all very overwhelming and draining, and I usually need to be alone in a dark quiet room for an hour or three after cub scouts every week, but...the boys have a good time!

And it is over now--mostly! Next time I meet with our group, we will be down to 6 boys, then the meeting after that, we will have only 5. We still have two more months of cub scouts before summer break, but with the slew of springtime birthdays, my group will shrink by more than half by then so we are winding down now. When all of the boys had pounded off to the gym after our activity was over tonight, I looked over at my partner and said "that was our last activity with EIGHT boys!" We did a semi-desperate laugh/whimper and hugged in acknowledgment of the victory/relief that we had survived the school year. Cub scouts is not for the faint of heart.

Oh my goodness, for our activity tonight we constructed "a car that moves on its own," following the directions to assemble a balloon car from the wolf scout book (the Motor Away! elective). When we passed out the materials (which had arrived at my house in the nick of time this afternoon via Amazon Prime), the boys immediately began blowing up their balloons and letting them sail around the room spewing breath and spittle in all directions. I implemented Stern-Shaina voice at that point and said "All. Balloons. On. The. Table." Ughhhh, I touched nearly everybody's spit while helping tape straws to the ends of the balloons so they could be used to power the vehicles. I lost at least two layers of skin cells while ripping and distributing duct tape.

Ambiance: Our tiny classroom in the church building was filled with several human aromas, from stinky feet to foul farts to boy breath to sweaty armpits to slobber and boogers. I'm not sure I ever fully appreciated the vast variety of different smells the pre-pubescent human body is capable of producing until I joined cub scouts.

As we worked on making our bottle cars go forward, powered by the air from the balloons, I had to mentally disconnect the part of my brain that was calculating the number of germs floating thick in the smelly air I was breathing. The entire room was misted in a cocktail of eight different flavors of saliva as each boy repeatedly blew up his balloon and then let it deflate. Spit and breath condensation dripped from the tips of eight straws onto the table. We were all mixed together in one 10x10 carpeted petri dish! In spite of my internal recoiling, I kept taping and troubleshooting right there along with my partner until the boys were satisfied with their creations. Eventually most of the cars scooted forward a few inches--self-propelled by spit/breath/air--and we had cleanup time.

The boys played four corners for the final ten minutes of our activity tonight. In order to prevent the temptation of peeking, the person in the middle covered his head with my vest. That's when the germ situation nearly drowned me: all of that eye-rubbing, nose-picking, mouth wiping, and hand-coughing was now being transferred person to person, via an article of my own clothing. The collection of body fluids and bacteria in my vest was made certain when one boy started rubbing his eyes and nose on my vest while it was on his head. It was then that I felt the half-imagined spit-mist clinging to my shirt and pants. I am not generally overly germ-a-phobic, but spending time with groups of kids is enough to give anyone a germ complex. Kids are completely unaware of the chain of communication that happens after they pick their nose and touch the shared pair of scissors! Childhood is bliss!

When I arrived home half an hour later, I mentally sang the ABC's twice while scrubbing my hands to the wrist bones with an extra squirt of soap (the only reason I didn't wash up to my elbows was because I was wearing a long sleeve shirt). Then I carefully changed into my pajamas and put all of my clothing, including the down vest, into the washer and started it up. Resisting the urge to shower (thankfully my hair was in a bun during tonight's balloon-spit-mist-a-thon), I felt acceptably sanitized and went to help Jeff put the kids to bed.

Odors, fluids, and germs notwithstanding, we have had a great group of eight 8-year-old boys this year. They are creative, enthusiastic, hopeful, up for anything, and endlessly hungry. I enjoy their personalities, their quirks, and their insights, delivered with intense thoughtful eyes and matter-of-fact boyish reasoning. It really is great to be eight: the possibilities are endless to these boys. In spite of the social battering that my inner introvert endures during cub scouts, I do feel glad to have gotten to know these bright boys a little better over the past few months. They are formidable as a group, but as individuals they are darling little dears, figuring this world out by trial and error, undaunted, one day at a time.

 Construction.

 Testing out the spit cars in the gym. Did I say spit cars? I meant balloon cars.

Reviewing the rules to the four corners game.