Why yes, I am the number one manager of people under the age of twelve in a severe weather situation.
I almost cancelled rehearsal today. By the beginning of the afternoon we were under a tornado watch that was supposed to last until well after sundown. Looking at the radar, I guessed the storm was two hours away, which would mean that it would hit just as rehearsal got out. Intelligently, I made rehearsal for the K-2nd graders only one hour instead of two for the 3-5th graders, so they'd be long out of there.
I had rehearsal (more on that later). About four thirty the kids all looked out the windows and saw the black clouds and all instantly became storm experts. "They're not transparent, there won't be a tornado unless they're transparent." "We live in the middle of a valley, we'll never have a tornado." (Look up the biggest tornado in the history of the state and realise I live in the next town over, which made it through unscathed back then.) "Let's go sit in the bathrooms right now!" "Mikey (the only boy in his age range) can't sit in the girl's bathroom!" "I'd rather stay here than go home if there's a tornado. We've got a lot of windows at our house." "Hey! If we stay here, we can eat dinner out of the vending machines in the teacher's lounge!" (Sounds like a week's worth of Family Circus comics, doesn't it?)
"There's not supposed to be a tornado," I replied. "It's just supposed to rain. You're all fine. Get away from the windows and behave yourselves."
Well, about four forty (proving my guess was pretty well right on) someone came down to tell me that yeah, the sirens in town were going off and we could either sit in the hall or go down to the cafeteria. I chose the cafeteria because sitting in the hall, to me, automatically means tornado drill.
I figured I'd get more questions, but all I had to say was that they told us we should go down and use the cafeteria now, and they went. Thankfully no one outright asked if there was a tornado warning, because I'm of two minds of this sort of thing.
On the one hand, I hate to lie to kids. I don't mind pulling their legs, and keep them on their toes, but I don't like to lie to them. On the other hand, some kids are more paranoid than others.
When I was a kid, I knew storms, tornados, all that, not something that bothered me. (My brother, in typical my brother fashion was scared of them for years.) I have since slept through tornado sirens and any variety of nighttime catastrophes. I have spent the summers informing clueless counsellors that storm cells have about a half hour life span, and if you know how many cells you're dealing with, you can predict the length of the storm to about twenty minutes. So, when I was at camp, I wanted to KNOW what was going on. If it was just rain, I wanted to know it was just rain, if we were getting in the vans in the middle of the night, I wanted to be told that it wasn't just some terribly fun thing we all decided to do.
Now, however, I have seen kids go into hysterics over just a little rain. While part of that is compacted by the "I am sleeping in a canvas tent far away from any grown-ups", there are kids who go ballistic about the weather. That was the last thing I needed.
This is an interesting bunch of kids, to say the least. There aren't any poisonous ones like last time, which is nice. There are, at last count, something in the region of 25 of them.
The aforementioned Mikey is the brother of the Sticky Out Ears Page. I think I prefer the younger one, because he's all ideas where his brother is problems. I will start referring to him as Life Boy because he looks a lot like Mikey the Life Boy.
There are two quiet sisters and their cousin who I think I will appreciate. I have two pairs of siblings, one set of them are named exactly the same as my brother and I. (He managed to launch his shoe across the room right into her face. (I shall call them MiniMe and MiniMyBrother.) The other set are going to be the ones that I want to kill, because the boy kinda acts like he doesn't really want to be there, and the girl (I will have to refer to them as Adopted Girl and Her Brother, because that seems to be her trademark story... I'd use their names, but this is safer). Their mother seems like a wonderful woman, however.
There is a Kindergartener (pretty sure he is) who is the ADHD poster child. I figure as long as he's not being too disruptive I will let him hang out in his own little world as often as possible.
There's a seven year old girl, the youngest girl, who is incredibly shy and is probably terribly frightened of the older girls who are just loud, but think she's cute and want to be their friend. The older girls, as a rule, do not like the "little kids" because half of them are boys. I will have to find a way to keep them from scorning the little kids.
There's a pretty Indian girl (her folks are from India) who will probably be OK if she wasn't with Adopted Girl- they feed off each other and will not be quiet.
Then there's a girl who reminds me of the girl from the Pepsi commercials. Oddly enough, the Pepsi girl's name is Hallie, which is pretty close to the girl in the show. I'm going to like her. Her mother's the talker, interestingly enough.
There are two boys with the same name, but one of them has black hair and the other white blonde. I am terrified that I will begin referring to them as Black So-and-So and White So-and-So.
I think those are the ones who beg the most for nomenclature. There are other kids, mostly younger, but I don't think they're going to stick very much.
I cannot wait until I hear back from the older girls- I need someone older to look after one group or the other of them because I'm only one person. The younger half wander off and get lost, the older half can't be trusted to behave themselves.
They have informed me that they want to "do drama" not "play games". How do I convince them that these are one and the same thing? Half of them are already begging me to give them lines to learn. Sorry kids, go try out for the church pageant, we're doing this a little more free form. "So, how do you know it'll be good?" Trust me, OK? Your parents did.