I'm a sucker

Tonight was the family fun night for Catholic Schools Week and I got to run the sucker tree game. Sean isn't a sucker and he magically was assigned a moonlighting shift at this exact time. So I had all the kids and at least two of them were very crabby and one was close to bedtime but I couldn't leave her home. I volunteered to run a game back before I knew Sean was working but I figured the littles could just hang with me while I did it. Has anyone seen a two year old in front of a "tree" of suckers, next to a huge box of suckers? Emily sampled about 27 of them, thankfully tossing each one after just a few licks. I still feel like I need to sneak in and brush her teeth yet again while she is sleeping.

Anyway, the sugar crash was ugly, I had to force Megan to help me with them for a while. I believe she used up all her tickets to pay her friends to help her find Patrick at one point. At the end Emily disappeared while I was turning in my ticket apron and it took a while to find her. I knew she hadn't gone out the door but did start to panic after a few minutes. Megan found her playing in a preschool room and when I made her leave a baby doll behind it was a full on tantrum. I was so glad to find her...

Oh but the sucker tree is so stupid because it involves giving the tickets back based on the color on the stick. Even a second grader figures out that this is a win-win game and just keeps going and going and going. Tickets are flying all over, just a mess. The last ten minutes when I just didn't care, I don't even know what happened. At the very end, when I still had an enormous box of suckers and I was just letting kids take them. Some gave me tickets, I didn't care. Oh my God, just leave me alone and let me go home to my sweet, sweet bottle of hard cider. Do you think the right person will find this post and not ask me to volunteer next year??? I did feel like a sucker as there were quite a few families walking around both the mom and the dad with their one precious child. Really?? I am the one volunteering while my own kids run wild and/or don't get to play games because they are helping me by babysitting. Apparently not everyone else feels the Catholic guilt and responds to the pleas for volunteers. Clearly there are people who do WAY more than I do and props to them, but I think I am taking a pass until my kids are old enough to not need an eye on them every single freaking second. Sean stayed home to make the money to cover the donations we give, I will not cave to the guilt again. I'm out. Should I blog while I'm having my cider? It's an over sharing kind of night...